Lars P. Syll

Angus Deaton on the limited value of RCTs I think economists, especially development economists, are sort of like economists in the 50’s with regressions. They have a magic tool but they don’t yet have much of an idea of the problems with that magic tool. And there are a lot of them. I think it’s just like any other method of estimation, it has its advantages and disadvantages. I think RCTs rarely meet the hype. People turned to RCTs because they got tired of all the arguments over...

What makes arguments successful  [embedded content]

Economics textbooks — when the model becomes the message Wendy Carlin and David Soskice have a new intermediate macroeonomics textbook — Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability, and the Financial System (Oxford University Press 2015) — out on the market. It builds more than most other intermediate macroeconomics textbooks on supplying the student with a “systematic way of thinking through problems” with the help of formal-mathematical models. Carlin and Soskice explicitly adapts a ‘New...

After almost forty years in Lund, yours truly last year returned to the town where he was born and bred — Malmö. Taking a stroll in the neighbourhood with the dog further convinced me returning was a good decision …

Representative agent models — macroeconomic foundations made of sand Representative-agent models suffer from an inherent, and, in my view, fatal, flaw: they can’t explain any real macroeconomic phenomenon, because a macroeconomic phenomenon has to encompass something more than the decision of a single agent, even an omniscient central planner. At best, the representative agent is just a device for solving an otherwise intractable general-equilibrium model, which is how I think Lucas...

Excellent and not so excellent Nobel prize winners A truly excellent economics Nobel Prize–I have learned a lot from Angus Deaton. And I look at my desk and see my copy of Akerlof and Shiller’s Phishing for Phools that I am halfway through on my desk. And I think about the panel I was on with Paul Krugman at New York Comic Con yesterday. There is a subset of economics Nobel Prize winners who are true geniuses, from whom I have learned and continue to learn an immense amount. But then I...

On the irrelevance of formal logic in economics In the case of substantial arguments, however, there is no question of data and backing taken together entailing the conclusion, or failing to entail it: just because the steps involved are substantial ones, it is no use either looking for entailments or being disappointed if we do not find them. Their absence does not spring from a lamentable weakness in the arguments, but from the nature of the problems with which they are designed to deal....

Angus Deaton gets Nobel prize in economics Not bad at all. Deaton has made very interesting contributions to many fields in economics. The one below — on the restricted applicability of RCTs — is one of my favourites:  [embedded content] An area where Deaton has made significant contributions is income and consumption modeling. Here he has always shown a healthy doubt about the value of microfounded representative actors models: I realized, after a lot of agonizing and checking my...

The Nobel prize in economics is a disgrace. Dump it! The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, usually — incorrectly — referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics, is an award for outstanding contributions to the field of economics. The Prize in Economics was established and endowed by Sweden’s central bank Sveriges Riksbank in 1968 on the occasion of the bank’s 300th anniversary.The first award was given in 1969. The award this year is presented in...

Why studying economics makes you more corrupt There seems to be growing evidence that markets corrupt morals. For example, Falk and Szech (2013) showed that individuals behaved less morally in market frameworks than in non-market frameworks. It seems that people behave less morally if there is potential for greed to pay off … But markets and money are central topics in economics teaching. A study which focused on the education of individuals was provided by Frank and Schulze (2000) … They...