Lars P. Syll

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The Swedish for-profit ‘free school’ scandal In Sweden in 2023, we allow poorly performing private school companies to make sky-high profits — profits that the Swedish state gladly allows these companies to take from our tax-funded school vouchers. These smart welfare plunderers generally have higher profitability than the business sector as a whole, but when they are finished plundering, they hand over the problems and pupils to the much-maligned public...

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Bayes theorem — what’s the big deal? There’s nothing magical about Bayes’ theorem. It boils down to the truism that your belief is only as valid as its evidence. If you have good evidence, Bayes’ theorem can yield good results. If your evidence is flimsy, Bayes’ theorem won’t be of much use. Garbage in, garbage out. The potential for Bayes abuse begins with your initial estimate of the probability of your belief, often called the “prior” … In many cases,...

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Issue 103 of Real-World Economics Review is out Yours truly’s paper Mainstream economics — the poverty of fictional storytelling is downloadable here.

Busting the natural rate of unemployment myth Almost sixty years ago Milton Friedman wrote an (in)famous article arguing that (1) the natural rate of unemployment was independent of monetary policy and that (2) trying to keep the unemployment rate below the natural rate would only give rise to higher and higher inflation. The hypothesis has always been controversial, and much theoretical and empirical work has questioned the real-world relevance of the idea...

Never, never, never give in! .[embedded content]

The road to hell .[embedded content]

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