Lars P. Syll

What RCTs can and cannot tell us Unfortunately, social sciences’ hope that we can control simultaneously for a range of factors like education, labor force attachment, discrimination, and others is simply more wishful thinking. The problem is that the causal relations underlying such associations are so complex and so irregular that the mechanical process of regression analysis has no hope of unpacking them. One hope for quantitative researchers who...

Les dangers du wokisme .[embedded content] Comme l’a soutenu Braunstein,  le wokisme est une véritable religion sectaire absurde. Il est évident qu’il est en train de construire un nouveau totalitarisme de la pensée quasi-religieuse. Et c’est certainement une attaque farouche contre la science et contre la vérité. Mais il est aussi un mouvement sociopolitique qui a gagné en popularité ces dernières années. Et comment est-il possible que le wokisme ait pu...

The Deadly Sin of Statistical Reification People sometimes speak as if random variables “behave” in a certain way, as if they have a life of their own. Thus “X is normally distributed”, “W follows a gamma”, “The underlying distribution behind y is binomial”, and so on. To behave is to act, to be caused, to react. Somehow, it is thought, these distributions are causes. This is the Deadly Sin of Reification, perhaps caused by the beauty of the mathematics...

Subjective probability — answering questions nobody asked Solve for x — give a single, unique number — in the following equation: x + y = 3. Of course, it cannot be done: under no rules of mathematics can a unique x be discovered; there are one too many unknowns. Nevertheless, someone holding to the subjective interpretation of probability could tell us, say, “1 feel x = 7.” Or he might say, “The following is my distribution for the possible values of x.”...

Why MMT is needed Mainstream economists do not believe that “countries that borrow in their own currency should not worry about government deficits because they can always create money to finance their debt.” Looking at the result from a survey, not a single economist agreed with that statement. If these economists had been right, we would see lots of governments running out of money in 2020 and 2021. After all, tax revenues collapsed, government spending...

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Attending economics seminars — a total waste of time! Visiting economics conferences and seminars, the sessions usually start with the presentation of mathematical-statistical models building on assumptions somewhat analogous to “let us assume that people are green and descending from Mars” — and then long technical discussions follow on how good these models are at making us better understand contemporary societies and economies. Yours truly finds it...

Trygve Haavelmo — with the completion (in 1958) of the twenty-fifth volume of Econometrica — assessed the role of econometrics in the advancement of economics, and although mainly positive of the “repair work” and “clearing-up work” done, he also found some grounds for despair: We have found certain general principles which would seem to make good sense. Essentially, these principles are based on the reasonable idea that, if an economic model is in fact “correct” or “true,” we...

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Twist in my sobriety .[embedded content]