Lars P. Syll

NHST — a case of statistical pseudoscience NHST is an incompatible amalgamation of the theories of Fisher and of Neyman and Pearson (Gigerenzer, 2004). Curiously, it is an amalgamation that is technically reassuring despite it being, philosophically, pseudoscience. More interestingly, the numerous critiques raised against it for the past 80 years have not only failed to debunk NHST from the researcher’s statistical toolbox, they have also failed to be...

Modern econometrics is fundamentally based on assuming — usually without any explicit justification — that we can gain causal knowledge by considering independent variables that may have an impact on the variation of a dependent variable. This is however, far from self-evident. Often the fundamental causes are constant forces that are not amenable to the kind of analysis econometrics supplies us with. As Stanley Lieberson has it in his modern classic Making It Count: One can...

Hur mycket ojämlikhet tål samhället? Igår kväll arrangerade Malmö högskola ett samtal om ekonomi och ojämlikhet i dagens Sverige. Under Cecilia Nebels kompetenta ledning samtalade serietecknaren Sara Granér, professor Tapio Salonen och yours truly om vad de växande inkomst- och förmögenhetsklyftorna gör med vårt samhälle. Ni som inte hade möjlighet vara där, kan följa samtalet här.

Policy evaluation and the hazards to external validity As yours truly has repeatedly argued on this blog (e.g. here here here),  RCTs usually do not provide evidence that their results are exportable to other target systems. The almost religious belief with which many of its propagators portray it, cannot hide the fact that RCTs cannot be taken for granted to give generalizable results. That something works somewhere is no warranty for it to work for us or...

Regression analysis and randomisation distract us from the real scientific issues  In my view, regression models are not a particularly good way of doing empirical work in the social sciences today, because the technique depends on knowledge that we do not have. Investigators who use the technique are not paying adequate attention to the connection – if any – between the models and the phenomena they are studying. Their conclusions may be valid for the...

A meta-analysis identifies a set of studies, each of which provides one or more estimates of the effect of some intervention. For example, one might be interested in the impact of job training programs on prisoner behavior after release. For some studies, the outcome of interest might be earnings; do inmates who participate in job training programs have higher earnings after release than those who do not? For other studies, the outcome might be the number of weeks employed...

Formalized economics bordering on the insane What guarantee is there … that economic concepts can be mapped unambiguously and subjectively – to be terribly and unnecessarily mathematical about it – into mathematical concepts? The belief in the power and necessity of formalizing economic theory mathematically has thus obliterated the distinction between cognitively perceiving and understanding concepts from different domains and mapping them into each other....

Ljus i mörkret (personal) I dessa tider — när ljudrummet dränks i den kommersiella radions  pubertalflams — har man nästan gett upp. Men det finns ljus i mörkret. I programmet Text och musik med Eric Schüldt — som sänds på söndagsförmiddagarna i P2 mellan klockan 11 och 12 — kan man lyssna på seriös musik och en programledare som verkligen har något att säga. I dag kunde man bland annat höra filmmusik av vår egen Stefan Nilsson, vars musik till Ingmar...

The need for a new economics curriculum without the present suicidal formalism When the global economy crashed in 2008, the list of culprits was long, including dozy regulators, greedy bankers and feckless subprime borrowers. Now the dismal science itself is in the dock, with much soul-searching over why economists failed to predict the financial crisis. One of the outcomes of this debate is that economics students are demanding the reform of a curriculum...

Hemstadens poet har lämnat oss En man har gått ur tiden. Och en stad har mist sin store poet. Jacques Werup (1945-2016). Det var en match mellan MFF och HIF, arvfienden från Helsingborg, årets match. Jag var knappt tio år och MFF kunde för mig ‘aldrig’ förlora. Men HIF ledde med 2-0 en halvtimme in i andra halvlek, ‘Kajan’ stod i mål för ‘di blåe’, Tore Svensson hade blivit skadad och på den tiden fanns inga nya spelare att ta in. Kalle Svensson i HIF-målet...