Lars P. Syll

Smoke on the water  [embedded content] The unsurpassed rock MASTERPIECE.

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In The World in the Model Mary Morgan characterizes the modelling tradition of economics as one concerned with “thin men acting in small worlds” and writes: Strangely perhaps, the most obvious element in the inference gap for models … lies in the validity of any inference between two such different media – forward from the real world to the artificial world of the mathematical model and back again from the model experiment to the real material of the economic world. The model...

Yours truly föreläser om nyliberalism Smålands Nation Kastanjegatan 7, Lund 2 februari kl. 18.00-20.00

Don’t let me be misunderstood  [embedded content]

Donald Trump’s running war on reality  [embedded content]

Trump and free trade Dear President Trump, Plenty of people will try to convince you that globalization and free trade could benefit everyone, if only the gains were more fairly shared … This belief is shared by almost all politicians in both parties, and it’s an article of faith for the economics profession. You are right to reject it … It’s a fallacy based on a fantasy, and it has been ever since David Ricardo dreamed up the idea of “Comparative Advantage...

Poverty — the Dumb and Dumber version A few years ago, two economics professors, Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor, published a paper, “The ‘Out of Africa’ Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development,” that drew inferences about poverty and genetics based on a statistical pattern … When the paper by Ashraf and Galor came out, I criticized it from a statistical perspective, questioning what I considered its overreach in making...

How to do econometrics properly Always, but always, plot your data. Remember that data quality is at least as important as data quantity. Always ask yourself, “Do these results make economic/common sense”? Check whether your “statistically significant” results are also “numerically/economically significant”. Be sure that you know exactly what assumptions are used/needed to obtain the results relating to the properties of any estimator or test that you...

Quand on n’a que l’amour [embedded content] Une grande chanson d’espoir qui touche mon cœur toujours.