Lars P. Syll

Warranting causal claims — vouchers and clinchers Methods for warranting causal claims fall into two broad categories. There are those that clinch the conclusion but are narrow in their range of application; and those that merely vouch for the conclusion but are broad in their range of application. Derivation from theory falls into the first category, as do randomized clinical trials (RCTs), econometric methods and others. What is characteristic of...

Paul Krugman — finally — admits he was wrong! In a recent essay titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,” adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization” and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial middle class in America. And many of...

‘Severe tests’ of causal claims For many questions in the social sciences, a research design guaranteeing the validity of causal inferences is difficult to obtain. When this is the case, researchers can attempt to defend hypothesized causal relationships by seeking data that subjects their theory to repeated falsification. Karl Popper famously argued that the degree to which we have confidence in a hypothesis is not necessarily a function of the number of...

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Radikala räntehöjningar får inte vår ekonomi i balans En gång i tiden var ledstjärnan för den ekonomiska politiken att mildra konjunktur-svängningarna och kapa de djupa dalarna och höga topparna. Nu vill Riksbanken skapa en ekonomisk nedgång för att få ner inflationen samtidigt som finanspolitiken passivt ser på. Penningpolitiken ser ut att kunna sänka den svenska ekonomin. Riksbanken balanserar kort sagt på en knivsegg. Konsensus grundar sig ofta på dogm....

Truth will prevail at last … .[embedded content]

Postmodernism — self-refuting nonsense .[embedded content]

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MMT — Krugman still does not get it! Krugman complains that Lerner was too “cavalier” in his discussion of monetary policy since he called for the interest rate to be set at the level that produces “the most desirable level of investment” without saying exactly what that rate should be. It’s an odd critique, since Krugman himself subscribes to the idea that monetary policy should target an invisible “neutral rate,” a so-called r-star that exists when the...

Skicka Zlatanstatyn till Qatar! Även i form av en staty ställer fotbollspelaren Zlatan Ibrahimovic till problem för sin omgivning. Efter Zlatans senaste kärleksförklaring till diktaturen Qatar vågar nu inte ens Malmös ledande politiker ta i frågan om den nu tydligen reparerade statyn ska placeras på synbar plats eller inte. De avböjer till och med att kommentera det problem som uppstått sedan Zlatan ställt sig i spetsen som Qatar-regimens kanske allra...