Lars P. Syll

Online teaching hurts the weakest​ students A single teacher can reach thousands of students in an online course, opening up a world of knowledge to anyone with an internet connection. This limitless reach also offers substantial benefits for school districts that need to save money, by reducing the number of teachers. But in high schools and colleges, there is mounting evidence that the growth of online education is hurting a critical group: the less...

Why you should​ distrust the twisted ‘identity politics’ ideology  [embedded content] Advertisements

Mainstream economics gets the priorities wrong There is something about the way economists construct their models nowadays that obviously doesn’t sit right. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics still has not given way to methodological pluralism based on ontological considerations (rather than formalistic tractability). In their search for model-based...

Für Lennart in memoriam  [embedded content] Advertisements

The real flimflam man As yours truly noted the other day, Oxford professor Simon Wren-Lewis has been relentless in his efforts to defend orthodox macroeconomic theory against attacks from pluralist rethinking economics students and ‘heterodox’ critics like yours truly. Answering to this critique, Wren-Lewis now says he finds my view that he “obviously shares the view that there is nothing basically wrong with ‘standard’ theory” nothing but rather ‘pathetic’...

Mark Lilla and the identity politics trap ZEIT: Warum führt Identitätspolitik überhaupt zu dieser Stärkung des Identitätsbegriffes? Lief die Ursprungsidee nicht auf das Gegenteil hinaus – auf die Dekonstruktion von Identität? Lilla: Man findet beides. Wobei “Dekonstruktion” natürlich nur was für reiche Kinder aus der Bourgeoisie ist, die an wahnsinnig teuren Eliteuniversitäten studieren. Die sind die Einzigen auf der Welt, die sich für Dekonstruktion...

Jämviktsarbetslöshet — ett farligt och missvisande mått med kända brister Trots, eller kanske tack vare, de goda utsikterna varnar flera bankekonomer för att ekonomin nu är på väg in i en överhettning. Konjunkturinstitutet (KI) uttrycker oro över att finanspolitiken riskerar bli för expansiv. Myndigheten menar att budgetmålet riskerar att inte hålla samtidigt som det råder brist på strukturella reformer för att minska arbetslösheten på sikt. Trots sjunkande...

CNN on the real ‘shithole’ and his allies  [embedded content] Advertisements

What should we do with econometrics? Econometrics … is an undoubtedly flawed paradigm. Even putting aside the myriad of technical issues with misspecification and how these can yield results that are completely wrong, after seeing econometric research in practice I have become skeptical of the results it produces. Reading an applied econometrics paper could leave you with the impression that the economist (or any social science researcher) first formulated...

Steven Pinker on political correctness  [embedded content] It really says something truly depressing about our times when this kind of self-evident things have to be said … Advertisements