Lars P. Syll

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...

Det är inte lätt alltid att vara PK …

Yours truly i MMT intervju Flamman (F): Först och främst, vad är MMT? Lars Pålsson Syll (LPS): I grunden är det en reaktion på sättet som pengar och hur de skapas beskrivs i den traditionella ekonomiska litteraturen. Där beskrivs pengar som något som man sparar genom att  in dem på banken, och som banken i sin tur kan låna ut genom att skapa krediter. Bankernas pengaskapande förutsätter alltså att privata individer sparar. Men den idén är fullständigt fel,...

The difference between rate and probability (wonkish) Suppose there is a series of Bernoulli trials, that each trial has the same probability p of success, and that the trials are independent—like the standard model of coin tossing, treating ‘heads’ as ‘success.’ Then the Law of Large Numbers guarantees that the rate of successes converges (in probability) to the probability of success. If a sequence of trials is random and the chance of success is the same...