Lars P. Syll

Using counterfactuals in causal inference I have argued that there are four major problems in the way of using the counterfactual account for causal inference. Of the four, I argued that the fourth — the problem of indeterminacy — is likely to be the most damaging: To the extent that some of the causal principles that connect counterfactual antecedent and consequent are genuinely indeterministic, the counterfactual will be of the “might have been” and not...

On the limited value of randomization In Social Science and Medicine (December 2017), Angus Deaton & Nancy Cartwright argue that Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) do not have any warranted special status. They are, simply, far from being the ‘gold standard’ they are usually portrayed as: Contrary to frequent claims in the applied literature, randomization does not equalize everything other than the treatment in the treatment and control groups, it...

.[embedded content] Absolutely lovely! Comedian and television host Jon Stewart turns out to know much more about real-world economics than mainstream Harvard economist Larry Summers. Don’t know why, but watching this interview/debate makes yours truly come to think about a famous H. C. Andersen tale …

Greatest intro in pop history .[embedded content] Norman Whitfield’s instrumental arrangement to this 1972 ‘psychedelic soul’ hit is still unparalleled.

Physics envy — a sure way to make economics useless In the 1930s, Lionel Robbins laid down the basic commandments of the discipline when he said that the premises on which economics was founded followed from ‘deduction from simple assumptions reflecting very elementary facts of general experience’, and as such were ‘as universal as the laws of mathematics or mechanics, and as little capable of “suspension”. Ah yes, general experience. What did Albert...

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Does randomization control for ‘lack of balance’? Mike Clarke, the Director of the Cochrane Centre in the UK, for example, states on the Centre’s Web site: ‘In a randomized trial, the only difference between the two groups being compared is that of most interest: the intervention under investigation’. This seems clearly to constitute a categorical assertion that by randomizing, all other factors — both known and unknown — are equalized between the...

In The World in the Model, Mary Morgan characterizes the modelling tradition of economics as one concerned with “thin men acting in small worlds” and writes: Strangely perhaps, the most obvious element in the inference gap for models … lies in the validity of any inference between two such different media – forward from the real world to the artificial world of the mathematical model and back again from the model experiment to the real material of the economic world. The model...

The insufficiency of validity Mainstream economics is at its core in the story-telling business whereby economic theorists create make-believe analogue models of the target system – usually conceived as the real economic system. This modelling activity is considered useful and essential. Since fully-fledged experiments on a societal scale as a rule are prohibitively expensive, ethically indefensible or unmanageable, economic theorists have to substitute...