Lars P. Syll

Jordan Peterson on responsibility and political correctness  [embedded content] Advertisements

Non-ergodicity and the poverty of kitchen sink modeling  [embedded content] When I present this argument … one or more scholars say, “But shouldn’t I control for everything I can in my regressions? If not, aren’t my coefficients biased due to excluded variables?” This argument is not as persuasive as it may seem initially. First of all, if what you are doing is misspecified already, then adding or excluding other variables has no tendency to make things...

In mainstream economics — especially in microeconomics, social choice and game theory — it is taken for granted (by definition) that the actors appearing in the model world, are rational and try to satisfy given preferences. But, confronting the axiomatic model world with the real world, it usually turns out that quite a few actors​ are irrational. In a classic experiment conducted by Barbara McNeil and colleagues, it was investigated how variations in the way information was...

Deutschlands größte Qualitätszeitung — Die Zeit — bietet uns auch in dieser Woche wieder herausfordernde Kommentare und konträre Sichtweisen. Advertisements

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How money is created Everything we know is not just wrong – it’s backwards. When banks make loans, they create money. This is because money is really just an IOU. The role of the central bank is to preside over a legal order that effectively grants banks the exclusive right to create IOUs of a certain kind, ones that the government will recognise as legal tender by its willingness to accept them in payment of taxes. There’s really no limit on how much...

Düütschland word nich armer durch anner Spraken  [embedded content] Advertisements

Kan Chile så kan Sverige! På SvD Debatt argumenter idag Gunilla Andersson och yourst truly för att beslutet att släppa in vinstdrivande företag i välfärdssektorn har varit ett dyrköpt misstag. I Chile satte man på skolområdet stopp för detta för ett par år sedan. Sverige är nu det enda land i världen som accepterar vinstintresse i skattefinansierade skolor. Men — kan Chile rätta till misstag så borde vi också kunna! Grundfrågan är inte om skattefinansierade...

Paul Rosenbaum’s latest book — Observation and experiment: an introduction to causal inference — is a well-written introduction to some of the most important and far-reaching ideas in modern statistics. With only a minimum of mathematics, ​the author manages to give a lively and interesting​ account of how statisticians try to use statistics to make causal inferences from observational studies and experiments. For non-graduate social science students with no or little...