Lars P. Syll

The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages. What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here...

“Mediation analysis” is this thing where you have a treatment and an outcome and you’re trying to model how the treatment works: how much does it directly affect the outcome, and how much is the effect “mediated” through intermediate variables … In the real world, it’s my impression that almost all the mediation analyses that people actually fit in the social and medical sciences are misguided: lots of examples where the assumptions aren’t clear and where, in any case,...

To save Europe we have to abandon the euro The euro crisis is far from over. The tough austerity measures imposed in the eurozone has made economy after economy contract. And it has not only made things worse in the periphery countries, but also in countries like France and Germany. Alarming facts that should be taken seriously. The problems – created to a large extent by the euro – may not only endanger our economies, but also our democracy itself. How...

The correlation between high executive pay and good performance is “negligible”, a new academic study has found, providing reformers with fresh evidence that a shake-up of Britain’s corporate remuneration systems is overdue. Although big company bosses enjoyed pay rises of more than 80 per cent in a decade, performance as measured by economic returns on invested capital was less than 1 per cent over the period, the paper by Lancaster University Management School says. “Our...

Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. But do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all? Have not generations of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then be fitted into a...

Luc Ferry et les maths  [embedded content] Advertisements

Haavelmo and Frisch on the limited value of econometrics For the sake of balancing the overly rosy picture of econometric achievements given in the usual econometrics textbooks today, it may be interesting to see how Trygve Haavelmo — with the completion (in 1958) of the twenty-fifth volume of Econometrica — assessed the role of econometrics in the advancement of economics. Although mainly positive of the “repair work” and “clearing-up work” done, Haavelmo...

Macron et le respect  [embedded content] Fort avec les faibles, faible avec les forts. Advertisements

Politische Korrektheit — Nein, danke! Ich bin, und zwar von ganzem Herzen, Schriftstellerin, Reisejournalistin, Literaturver-anstalterin und Weltreisende – und in allen diesen meinen Inkarnationen nagt die Political Correctness zunehmend an meinen Fundamenten. Nicht zuletzt an meinen Idealen: Aufklärung. Gleichberechtigung. Empathie und eine Mitmenschlichkeit, die blind ist für Kategorien wie Ethnie, Gender, Herkunft. War PC nicht einst, vor ihrer...

Why the euro cannot be saved The euro may be approaching another crisis. Italy, the eurozone’s third largest economy, has chosen what can at best be described as a Euroskeptic government. This should surprise no one. The backlash in Italy is another predictable (and predicted) episode in the long saga of a poorly designed currency arrangement, in which the dominant power, Germany, impedes the necessary reforms and insists on policies that exacerbate the...