Lars P. Syll

On probabilism and statistics ‘Mr Brown has exactly two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that the other is a girl?’ What could be simpler than that? After all, the other child either is or is not a girl. I regularly use this example on the statistics courses I give to life scientists working in the pharmaceutical industry. They all agree that the probability is one-half. So they are all wrong. I haven’t said that the older...

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A night at the Roxbury  [embedded content] Advertisements

Jordan Peterson lecturing an incompetent journalist on gender inequality When discussing things it is definitely good to know what you are talking about. A good rule that certainly also applies to journalists …  [embedded content] Advertisements

Paul Romer leaves the World Bank Outspoken chief economist Paul Romer is leaving the World Bank “effective immediately” after just 15 months on the job, the bank’s president told staff on Wednesday in an internal announcement seen by the Financial Times. Mr Romer, one of the US’s most celebrated economists, had been engaged in a running battle with staff economists at the bank almost since his high-profile arrival in October 2016. Areas of dispute have...

Jerome H. Powell sailed to Senate confirmation on Tuesday to become the 16th chairman of the Federal Reserve with a final vote of 84 to 13 … The bipartisan support for Mr. Powell was a sharp break from another Fed hearing earlier on Tuesday, when Mr. Brown and other Democrats questioned the qualifications of Marvin Goodfriend, a conservative economist nominated by Mr. Trump for a seat on the Fed’s board. Mr. Goodfriend repeatedly predicted after the 2008 financial crisis that...

Branko Milanovic and the hypocrites of the World Economic Forum Thousands of people will gather next week in Davos. Their combined wealth will reach several hundred billion dollars, perhaps even close to a trillion. Never in world history will be the amount of wealth per square foot so high. And this year, for the sixth or seventh consecutive time, what would be one of the principal topics addressed by these captains of industry, billionaires, employers of...

Wren-Lewis on internal consistency The example is the derivation of a benevolent policy maker’s preferences from the utility function of the representative consumer assumed as part of the model, a line of research initiated by Michael Woodford. Before getting on to the values point, let me note that it is a good example of the primacy of internal consistency in microfoundations rather than the Lucas critique. Before Woodford’s work, microfoundations...

RBC methodology — three decades of intellectual regress Neoclassical economics is known for its illicit use of garbled language which hides and convolutes instead of explains … An interesting example is the chapter by Edward Prescott, titled ‘RBC Methodology and the Development of Aggregate Economic Theory’ (ungated version). Let’s first give the floor to him (emphasis added), mind that ‘leisure’ means ‘measured unemployment’.: “What turned out to be the...