Lars P. Syll

On a winter’s day (personal)  [embedded content] Yes, indeed, looking out my library windows, the sky is grey, rain keeps falling, and spring seems to be far, far, away. Although it’s more than thirty years now since I was a student at the University of California, on a day like this, I sure wish I was there again …

Tony Lawson — en presentation En av de ledande metodologerna inom den ekonomiska vetenskapen i dag heter Tony Lawson. Denne engelske ekonom har i flera böcker på djupet undersökt och kritiserat de vetenskapsteoretiska och metodologiska fundamenten för den moderna nationalekonomin. Ekonomer uppvisar ofta ett svalt intresse inte bara för det egna ämnets idéhistoria, utan också för vetenskapsteoretiska reflektioner kring förutsättningarna för och antagandena...

Machine learning and causal inference  [embedded content]

Conventional thinking about financial markets begins with the idea that security prices always accurately reflect all available information; it ends with the belief that price changes come about only when there is new information. Markets are supposed to reflect new information quickly and efficiently, albeit with a few anomalies. In 2007, I interviewed over 50 investment managers mainly in New York, Boston, London, and Edinburgh. Talking to them I came to the conclusion that...

[embedded content] This one is for you — brothers and sisters, struggling to survive and risking your lives fighting for liberation. May God be with you.

Econometric causality and Simpson’s paradox Which causal relationships we see depend on which model we use and its conceptual/causal articulation; which model is bestdepends on our purposes and pragmatic interests. Take the case of Simpson’s paradox, which can be described as the situation in which conditional probabilities (often related to causal relations) are opposite for subpopulations than for the whole population. Let academic salaries be higher for...

Mainstream macro modeling — nothing but smoke and mirrors Those of us in the economics community who are impolite enough to dare question the preferred methods and models applied in mainstream macroeconomics, are as a rule met with disapproval. But although people seem to get very agitated and upset by the critique, defenders of ‘received theory’ always say that the critique is “nothing new”, that they have always been “well aware” of the problems, that...

So let’s say a woman faces discrimination by this definition – she loses out to a man with weaker credentials. “Loses out” itself is pretty vague and could reasonably be consistent with several different observed labor market outcomes, two of which are: Outcome A: She gets hired to the same job as the man but at lower pay, and Outcome B: She doesn’t get the job and instead takes her next best offer in a different occupation at lower pay. Let’s further say that she is paid her...

Halcyon days (Berlin 1988) Photo by Bengt Nilsson

Who do we trust? [h/t Edward Fullbrook]