Lars P. Syll

Mathematics and statistics do not solve our disagreements Statistical Science is not really very helpful for understanding or forecasting complex evolving self-healing organic ambiguous social systems – economies, in other words. A statistician may have done the programming, but when you press a button on a computer keyboard and ask the computer to find some good patterns, better get clear a sad fact: computers do not think. They do exactly what the...

The significance of insignificance (wonkish) Skewness, outliers, multiple hypothesis testing, and reliance on asymptotics often — as is well-known among most statisticians — give rise to spurious findings. But the problem may actually be even worse than we have thought. In an interesting new paper, Alwyn Young, after having looked at over 2000 regressions reported in American Economic Association journals, summarizes his findings: Armed with an idea and...

RCTs — the illusion of assumption-free learning Blinding is rarely possible in economics or social science trials, and this is one of the major differences from most (although not all) RCTs in medicine, where blinding is standard, both for those receiving the treatment and those administering it … Subjects in social RCTs usually know whether they are receiving the treatment or not and so can react to their assignment in ways that can affect the outcome...

A legend among legends has passed away  [embedded content]  [embedded content] [embedded content] Leonard Cohen (1934-2016)

Why Trump won the election Basically because these two economic theory monstrosities simply do not work!

The limitations of RCTs (wonkish) Yours truly is extremely fond of science philosophers and economists like Nancy Cartwright and Angus Deaton. With razor-sharp intellects they immediately go for the essentials. They have no time for bullshit. And neither should we: Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have been sporadically used in economic research since the negative income tax experiments between 1968 and 1980 … and have been regularly used since then to...

That a country that has given us presidents like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, is going to be run by a witless clown like Donald Trump is an absolute disgrace. Tuesday, November 8th, 2016 — a date which will live in infamy.

Hur stora klyftor tål Sverige? Malmö högskola arrangerar Bildningsbaren #3 – ett samtal om ekonomi och ojämlikhet Det talas allt mer om växande ekonomiska klyftor. De i toppen drar iväg från de i botten. Från att ha varit världshistoriens jämlikaste land har Sverige snabbt närmat sig genomsnittet inom OECD – ett genomsnitt där klyftorna också har ökat. I Bildningsbaren #3 pratar vi om de ekonomiska klyftorna och ojämlikhet i dagens Sverige. Sara Granér,...

Eleverna på friskolor får i regel ett högre betyg än vad de presterat på nationella proven jämfört med kommunala skolor. Särskilt stora är skillnaderna i matematik. Enligt Jonas Vlachos, nationalekonom vid Stockholms universitet, kan skillnaden bero på att fristående gymnasium har starkare skäl att sätta högre betyg. – Den enklaste förklaringen är att friskolor har starkare incitament att sätta högre betyg. De är mer beroende av elevunderlaget än vad kommunala skolor är. I...

The economics of stochastic Robinson Crusoes The increasing ascendancy of real business cycle theories of various stripes, with their common view that the economy is best modeled as a floating Walrasian equilibrium, buffeted by productivity shocks, is indicative of the depths of the divisions separating academic macroeconomists … If  these theories are correct, they imply that the macroeconomics developed in the wake of the Keynesian Revolution is well...