Lars P. Syll

.[embedded content] ‘Dian Fossey’ handlar om hur Annika Norlin föder barn. Alla som varit med om undret när ens barn kommer till världen känner nog igen sig. Det är den sorts upplevelse som glömskan aldrig rår på. Tack min son för att du tipsade mig om den här underbara låten!

Economics education needs a revolution You ask me what all idiosyncrasy is in philosophers? … For instance their lack of the historical sense, their hatred even of the idea of Becoming, their Egyptianism. They imagine that they do honour to a thing by divorcing it from history sub specie æterni—when they make a mummy of it. Friedrich Nietzsche Nowadays there is almost no place whatsoever in economics education for courses in the history of economic...

Modern mainstream (neoclassical) economics relies to a large degree on the notion of probability. To be amenable to applied economic analysis, economic observations allegedly have to be conceived as random events that are analyzable within a probabilistic framework. But is it really necessary to model the economic system as a system where randomness can only be analyzed and understood when based on an a priori notion of probability? When attempting to convince us of the...

Nazis, made in Austria .[embedded content] Der Schmerz, die Nazi-Gräueltaten zu beobachten, umfasst auch die moralischen und ethischen Fragen, die er aufwirft. Wie konnte eine zivilisierte Gesellschaft in solche Barbarei abrutschen? Wie konnten Menschen an solchen abscheulichen Taten teilnehmen oder ein Auge zudrücken? Dennoch finden wir gerade beim Zeugen dieser Geschichte auch ein Gefühl der Verantwortung. Das Beobachten, wie die Nazis — sowohl deutsche...

Isn’t it the mark of a successful theory of a range of phenomena that it unites and embraces the causally relevant parameters and state variables within a single theoretical perspective? This question suggests that if our theories are successful, then they should produce descriptions of systems according to which the systems are interactionally simple. I think that this would be to put the conceptual cart before the phenomenal horse. As the criterion (one of many) for the...

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What is meant by ‘rigour’ in evidence-based educational policy? The bad news is, first, that there is no reason in general to suppose that an ATE [Average Treatment Effect] observed in one population will hold in others. That is what the slogan widespread now in education and elsewhere registers: “Context matters”.  The issue in this paper is not though about when we can expect a study result to hold elsewhere but rather when we can have EBPP-style...

I Have A Dream .[embedded content] These days mark the 60th anniversary of Martin Luther King delivering his famous speech I Have A Dream at the March on Washington, which stands as one of the most iconic moments of the American civil rights movement. The speech is still relevant today because it visualizes a dream the society has not achieved yet. Martin Luther King’s influence on civil rights and social justice is indelible. His dedication to nonviolent...

What are RCTs good for? RCTs establish causal claims. They are very good at this. Indeed, given the probabilistic theory of causality it follows formally that positive results in an ideal RCT with treatment C and outcome E deductively implies ‘C causes E in the experimental population’. Though the move from the RCT to a policy prediction that C will cause E when implemented in a new population often goes under the single label, the external validity of the...

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