Lars P. Syll

Has economics really become an empirical science? As I see it, a rational predictor should use a combination of theory and empirics. But theory should also be informed by data – there are lots of theories, and in general they can’t all apply to the same situation, so you need evidence to tell you which one(s) to use. So a rational predictor’s predictions should always be tied as closely as possible to empirical evidence. Discounting empirical evidence …...

A democratic polity is supposed to be based on egalitarian distribution of political power. In a system where virtually all resources are available for a price, economic power can be translated into political power by channels too obvious for mention. In a capitalist society, economic power is very unequally distributed, and hence democratic government is inevitably something of a sham. In a sense, the maintained ideal of democracy makes matters worse, for it adds the tensions...

Where modern economics went wrong [embedded content] Many economists have over time tried to diagnose what’s the problem behind the ‘intellectual poverty’ that characterizes modern mainstream economics. Rationality postulates, rational expectations, market fundamentalism, general equilibrium, atomism, over-mathematisation are some of the things one have been pointing at. But although these assumptions/axioms/practices are deeply problematic, they are mainly...

Some methodological perspectives on statistical inference in economics Causal modeling attempts to maintain this deductive focus within imperfect research by deriving models for observed associations from more elaborate causal (‘structural’) models with randomized inputs … But in the world of risk assessment … the causal-inference process cannot rely solely on deductions from models or other purely algorithmic approaches. Instead, when randomization is...

Rational expectations — sheer nonsense Expectations, since they are informed predictions of future events, are essentially the same as the predictions of the relevant economic theory. At the risk of confusing this purely descriptive hypothesis with a pronouncement as to what firms ought to do, we call such expectations “rational.” It is sometimes argued that the assumption of rationality in economics leads to theories inconsistent with, or inadequate to...

Till Fadime Sahindal, född 2 april 1975 i Turkiet, mördad 21 januari 2002 i Sverige Det är nu mer än femton år sedan som Fadime Sahindal bestialiskt mördades av anhöriga för att hon själv ville välja hur hon skulle leva sitt liv. Den typen av hedersrelaterat våld har ibland försvarats med — djupt förfelade — kulturrelativistiska resonemang där kulturella skillnader setts som en i något avseende förmildrande omständighet. Men — i Sverige har kvinnor och män samma värde. Och...

Economics — confusing mathematical masturbation with intercourse between research and reality There’s no question that mainstream academic macroeconomics failed pretty spectacularly in 2008 … Many among the heterodox would have us believe that their paradigm worked perfectly well in 2008 and after … This is dramatically overselling the product. First, heterodox models didn’t “predict” the crisis in the sense of an actual quantitative forecast. This is...

Hur står det till med ekonomerna? Seminarium: Hur står det till med ekonomerna?De bommade finanskrisen. De skrev ut recept som förvärrade Greklandskrisen. De utgår från en människa som inte finns, och matematiska modeller som har väldigt lite med verkligheten att göra. Och de får bra betalt för jobbet. I nya numret av tidskriften Fronesis skärskådas den dominerande nationalekonomin, en vetenskap som har enorma anspråk, men som ständigt kommer till korta....

Dynamic programming — an introductory introduction  [embedded content] Advertisements

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