Lars P. Syll

Never seek to tell thy love (private)  [embedded content]

Bayesian rationality — a version of probabilistic irrationalism (wonkish) The initial choice of a prior probability distribution is not regulated in any way. The probabilities, called subjective or personal probabilities, reflect personal degrees of belief. From a Bayesian philosopher’s point of view, any prior distribution is as good as any other. Of course, from a Bayesian decision maker’s point of view, his own beliefs, as expressed in his prior distribution, may be better than any...

Neoclassical economics — purchasing validity at the cost of empirical content The fact that the economics profession was caught unawares in the long build- up to the 2007 worldwide financial crisis and substantially underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold can be attributed to two factors … first, the lack of an empirical motivation in the essential modelling assumptions, combined with questionable ceteris paribus assumptions; and second, a blatant disregard for the complete...

Denmark’s euro problem Denmark has combined high taxes and strong social benefits (free college, heavily subsidized child care, and more) with strong employment and high productivity. It shows that strong welfare states can work. But it is worth noting that Denmark has had a fairly bad run since the global financial crisis, with a severe slump and a very weak recovery. In fact, real GDP per capita is about as far below pre-crisis levels as that of Portugal or Spain, although with much less...

Jeffrey Sachs — studying neoclassical economics make students less ‘pro-social’ Students trained in egoistic game theory, notably in university courses in neoclassical economics, are less likely to cooperate in laboratory settings. There is now a large literature on the lower levels of pro-sociality of economics students compared with non-economics students … The findings of low pro-sociality among economics students are robust; the interpretation, however, has differed between those who...

Manhattan — Berlin  [embedded content]

 [embedded content]  The best clue to a nation’s growth and development potential is the status and role of women.                                

For those of us who can’t get enough of English eccentrics, Brewer’s Rogues, Villains, Eccentrics by William Donaldson is probably the funniest book ever written. I mean, just to take one example, where else would you find an entry like this one? Carlton, Sydney (1949- ), painter and decorator. Those who argue that bestiality should be treated with understanding had a setback in 1998 when Carlton, a married man from Bradford, was sentenced to a year in prison for having intercourse with a...

Why experimental economics is no real alternative to neoclassical economics One obvious interpretation is that Model-Platonism implies that economic models are Platonic, if they take the form of thought-experiments, which use idealized conceptions of certain objects or entities (Platonic archetypes). This clearly sounds like a pretty familiar procedure, although the rationale for the thought-experimental character of economic models (if they are conceived as such) has been transformed over...

Deborah Mayo vs. Andrew Gelman on the (non-)significance of significance tests Mayo: 

You seem to have undergone a gestalt switch from the Gelman of a short time ago–the one who embraced significance tests … Andrew: 

I believed, and still believe, in checking the fit of a model by comparing data to hypothetical replications. This is not the same as significance testing in which a p-value is used to decide whether to reject a model or whether to believe that a finding is true. Mayo: 
I...