Lars P. Syll

What can economists know? The early concerns voiced by such critics as Keynes and Hayek, while they may indeed have been exaggerated, were not misplaced. I believe that much of the difficulty economists have encountered over the past fifty years can be traced to the fact that the economic environment we seek to model are sometimes too messy to be fitted into the mold of a well-behaved, complete model of the standard kind. It is not generally the case that...

[embedded content] This one is in loving memory of Kristina, beloved wife and mother of David and Tora. But in dreams, I can hear your name. And in dreams, We will meet again. When the seas and mountains fall And we come to end of days, In the dark I hear a call Calling me there I will go there And back again. Advertisements

The Euler-Lagrange equation (student stuff)  [embedded content] Excellent lecture! Advertisements

Factor analysis — like telling time with a stopped clock Exploratory factor analysis exploits correlations to summarize data, and confirmatory factor analysis — stuff like testing that the right partial correlations vanish — is a prudent way of checking whether a model with latent variables could possibly be right. What the modern g-mongers do, however, is try to use exploratory factor analysis to uncover hidden causal structures. I am very, very interested...

Reasons to reject the standard rationality axioms in economics Those axioms—and you can find a whole series of people from Pareto onwards who make the same argument—come from economists’ introspection and what they think is necessary for their work, not from observation of what people are doing. Some of these axioms seem natural, at least at first sight. For example, transitivity seems a natural idea—if you prefer A to B and B to C, you also prefer A to C....

Edward Snowden — unbroken and unconquerable [embedded content] This one is for you. Bravest of the brave. Never give in. Never give up. Advertisements

Modern macroeconomics — a walk down a blind alley I would say that macroeconomic theory has gone down a blind alley in the sense that we have locked onto a particular model: general equilibrium. But it is not really general equilibrium, I mean, it is a one-man model! In particular, it has become mathematically sophisticated without representing the fundamental features of the macro-economy. So I would say that people like Kydland and Prescott, and so forth,...

Solving the fundamental problem of decision theory (wonkish) Currently the dominant formalism for treating the [general gamble] problem is utility theory. Utility theory was born out of the failure of the following behavioral null model: individuals were assumed to optimize changes in the expectation values of their wealth. We argue that this null model is a priori a bad starting point because the expectation value of wealth does not generally reflect what...

Problem kring hedersvåld och hedersförtryck har diskuterats länge. Det uppmärksammade mordet på Fadime Sahindal för femton år sedan blev något av ett startskott. Dessvärre är det lite som tyder på att de ansträngningar som gjorts haft någon påtaglig effekt. Istället förvärras problemet. I en rapport 2014 som togs fram av Carin Götblad, för närvarande chef för Polisregion Mitt, bedömdes omkring 100 000 svenska ungdomar upp till 25 år leva med “hedersrelaterade begränsningar”....

The one place that preregistration is really needed … is if you want clean p-values. A p-value is very explicitly a statement about how you would’ve analyzed the data, had they come out differently. Sometimes when I’ve criticized published p-values on the grounds of forking paths, the original authors have fought back angrily, saying how unfair it is for me to first make an assumption about what they would’ve done under different conditions, and then make conclusions based on...