Lars P. Syll

.[embedded content] Sublime, breathtaking, and absolutely magnificent. A choir of angels touching the depths of my soul. In loving memory of my parents-in-law, Ritva [† 2021] and Erik Syll [† 2020]

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Christine Lagarde must have been reading my blog … European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde launched a stinging attack on the economics profession on Wednesday (17 January), accusing analysts of having “blind faith” in their models, which often bear little connection to reality. Speaking at an event entitled “How to Trust Economics” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the ECB chief also suggested that economists constitute a “tribal clique” whose...

Why quasi-experimental evaluations fail Evaluation research tends to be method-driven. Everything needs to be apportioned as an ‘input’ or ‘output’, so that the programme itself becomes a ‘variable’, and the chief research interest in it is to inspect the dosage in order to see that a good proper spoonful has been applied … The quasi-exprimental conception is again deficient. Communities clearly differ. They also have attributes that are not reducible to...

Design-based vs model-based inferences Following the introduction of the model-based inferential framework by Fisher and the introduction of the design-based inferential framework by Neyman [and Pearson], survey sampling statisticians began to identify their respective weaknesses. With regard to the model-based framework, sampling statisticians found that conditioning on all stratification and selection/recruitment variables, and allowing for their...

RCTs in the field of development — a critical perspective .[embedded content]

Are RCTs — really — the best way to establish causality? The best method is always the one that yields the most convincing and relevant answers in the context at hand. We all have our preferred methods that we think are underused. My own personal favorites are cross-tabulations and graphs that stay close to the data; the hard work lies in deciding what to put into them and how to process the data to learn something that we did not know before, or that...

Jon Elster and the dangers of excessive ambitions .[embedded content] Most mainstream economists want to explain social phenomena, structures and patterns, based on the assumption that the agents are acting in an optimizing — rational — way to satisfy given, stable and well-defined goals. The procedure is analytical. The whole is broken down into its constituent parts to be able to explain (reduce) the aggregate (macro) as the result of the interaction of...

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A philosopher’s look at science You will already be familiar with the fact that broad swathes of social science research are given over to establishing, analysing, generalising, theorising about and using statistical associations that are manipulated with the assumptions of probability theory. This makes sense if probabilities can be attached to broad swathes of the phenomena that social science is meant to deal with. But can they? Here we face the same...