Lars P. Syll

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Quran burnings in Sweden This week, yet another Quran was burned outside a mosque in Stockholm, Sweden. It was, similar to previous burnings, a highly provocative act and one may of course ask why it received permission? Because freedom of expression carries more weight! Turkey’s Minister of Foreign Affairs quickly took to Twitter to condemn “the despicable act in Sweden,” and a spokesperson for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stated that tolerating...

The inherent epistemological limitation of econometric testing To understand the relationship between economic data and economic phenomena, it is helpful first to be clear about what we mean by each of these terms. Following Jim Woodward (1989), we can characterize “phenomena” as features of our experience that we take to be “relatively stable” and “which are potential objects of explanation and prediction by general theory.” The phenomena themselves are in...

The façade of precision in mainstream economics [Jevons] is a man of some ability, but he seems to me to have a mania for encumbering questions with useless complications, and with a notation implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of.  John Stuart Mill Fixation on constructing models — “implying the existence of greater precision in the data than the questions admit of” — showing the certainty of logical entailment...

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.[embedded content] Although it’s forty years now since I was a research student at the ​University of California, on a day like this, I sure wish I was back in Redondo Beach, Ocean Park, Venice Beach …

The lack of theory in social experiments Jason Collins discusses a paper by Milkman et al. that presented “a megastudy testing 54 interventions to increase the gym visits of 61,000 experimental participants” … Collins’s discussion seems reasonable to me. In particular, I agree with his big problem about the design of this “mega-study,” which is that there’s all sorts of rigor in the randomization and analysis plan, but no rigor at all when it comes to...

Hans-Jürgen Krahl and the Frankfurt School .[embedded content]

My favourite French teacher .[embedded content]

Sraffa on Ricardo’s ‘corn model’ (wonkish) After being tasked with editing David Ricardo’s Collected Works in 1930, Sraffa, with the assistance of Maurice Dobb, published them between 1951 and 1973. This work earned him the 1961 Söderström Gold Medal from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. For the edition, Sraffa wrote an interesting and thought-provoking introduction. Its purpose was to demonstrate that the classical economists based their theory on...