Lars P. Syll

Årets dumstrut i Malmös politik MALMÖ. Klagomålen på den kommunala förskolan har mer än fördubblats de senaste två åren, men det oroar inte Rose-Marie Carlsson (S), ordförande i förskolenämnden. – En ökning av klagomålen behöver inte betyda att det blivit sämre. Tvärtom, säger hon. Omorganisationen 2013, då förskolan fick egen nämnd och förvaltning, innebar även ett nytt sätt att arbeta med klagomålshantering. –Det är enklare nu för vårdnadshavare att lämna...

Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity of human ensembles. Many scientists agree that ergodicity is one of the most important concepts in statistics. So, what is it? Suppose you are concerned with determining what the most visited parks in a city are. One idea is to take a momentary snapshot: to see how many people are...

Mainstream economics — sacrificing realism at the altar of mathematical purity Economists are too detached from the real world and have failed to learn from the financial crisis, insisting on using mathematical models which do not reflect reality, according to the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane. The public has lost faith in economists since the credit crunch, he said, but the profession has failed to thoroughly re-examine its failings to...

The rebel who blew up macroeconomics Paul Romer says he really hadn’t planned to trash macroeconomics as a math-obsessed pseudoscience. Or infuriate countless colleagues. It just sort of happened … The upshot was “The Trouble With Macroeconomics,” a scathing critique that landed among Romer’s peers like a grenade. In a time of febrile politics, with anti-establishment revolts breaking out everywhere, faith in economists was already ebbing: They got blamed...

‘Post-real’ macroeconomics — three decades of intellectual regress Macroeconomists got comfortable with the idea that fluctuations in macroeconomic aggregates are caused by imaginary shocks, instead of actions that people take, after Kydland and Prescott (1982) launched the real business cycle (RBC) model … In response to the observation that the shocks are imaginary, a standard defence invokes Milton Friedman’s (1953) methodological assertion from unnamed...

Public debt should not be zero. Ever! Nation states borrow to provide public capital: For example, rail networks, road systems, airports and bridges. These are examples of large expenditure items that are more efficiently provided by government than by private companies. The benefits of public capital expenditures are enjoyed not only by the current generation of people, who must sacrifice consumption to pay for them, but also by future generations who will...

Slim by chocolate — a severe case of goofed p-hacking Frank randomly assigned the subjects to one of three diet groups. One group followed a low-carbohydrate diet. Another followed the same low-carb diet plus a daily 1.5 oz. bar of dark chocolate. And the rest, a control group, were instructed to make no changes to their current diet. They weighed themselves each morning for 21 days, and the study finished with a final round of questionnaires and blood...

Econometrics — science built on beliefs and untestable assumptions What is distinctive about structural models, in contrast to forecasting models, is that they are supposed to be – when successfully supported by observation – informative about the impact of interventions in the economy. As such, they carry causal content about the structure of the economy. Therefore, structural models do not model mere functional relations supported by correlations, their...

Follies and fallacies of Chicago economics Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions. John...

Top 10 critiques of econometrics •Achen, Christopher (1982). Interpreting and using regression. SAGE •Berk, Richard (2004). Regression Analysis: A Constructive Critique. SAGE •Freedman, David (1991). ‘Statistical Models and Shoe Leather’. Sociological Methodology •Kennedy, Peter (2002).  ‘Sinning in the Basement: What are the Rules? The Ten Commandments of Applied Econometrics’. Journal of Economic Surveys •Keynes, John Maynard (1939). ‘Professor...