Lars P. Syll

När Ekonomistas är som bäst För att utröna vilka effekter skolval har är det naturligtvis centralt att känna till vilken typ av skolor familjer föredrar. Det finns i princip två sätt att få kunskap kring detta: man kan fråga familjer vilken typ av skolor de uppskattar och man kan observera vilka skolor familjer faktiskt väljer. Vilken metod man väljer kan ge väldigt olika svar, vilket manifesteras i en debattartikel av Almega och Friskolornas Riksförbund...

Paul Krugman has often been criticized by people like yours truly for getting things pretty wrong on the economics of John Maynard Keynes. When Krugman has responded to the critique, by himself rather gratuitously portrayed as about “What Keynes Really Meant,” the overall conclusion is — “Krugman Doesn’t Care.” Responding to an earlier post of mine questioning his IS-LM-Keynesianism, Krugman write: Surely we don’t want to do economics via textual analysis of the masters. The...

People having bad luck when trying to think A couple of years ago Andrew Lilico wrote an article in The Telegraph arguing that good economists almost always are — mirabile dictu — right: Lord Turner wrote two reports creating important government policies based on his claim that people are often irrational — his pension review of 2005 and his report on the financial crisis in 2009. Indeed, in his famous Turner Review of the financial crisis as chairman of...

Statisticism — confusing statistics and research Coupled with downright incompetence in statistics, we often find the syndrome that I have come to call statisticism: the notion that computing is synonymous with doing research, the naïve faith that statistics is a complete or sufficient basis for scientific methodology, the superstition that statistical formulas exist for evaluating such things as the relative merits of different substantive theories or the...

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Touring again. Visiting Stockholm. Guest appearance​s​ in the Swedish Parliament and Riksbank. Regular blogging to be resumed during the weekend. Advertisements

 [embedded content] In memory of Kristina, beloved wife and mother of David and Tora. Today, twenty-five years ago, the unthinkable happened. People say that time heals all wounds. I wish that was true. Advertisements

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Oh dear, oh dear, Krugman gets it so wrong, so wrong Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world. It is compelled to be this, because, unlike the typical natural science, the material to which it is applied is, in too many respects, not homogeneous through time. The object of a model is to segregate the semi-permanent or relatively constant factors from those which...