Lars P. Syll

Does randomization control for ‘lack of balance’? Mike Clarke, the Director of the Cochrane Centre in the UK, for example, states on the Centre’s Web site: ‘In a randomized trial, the only difference between the two groups being compared is that of most interest: the intervention under investigation’. This seems clearly to constitute a categorical assertion that by randomizing, all other factors — both known and unknown — are equalized between the...

In The World in the Model, Mary Morgan characterizes the modelling tradition of economics as one concerned with “thin men acting in small worlds” and writes: Strangely perhaps, the most obvious element in the inference gap for models … lies in the validity of any inference between two such different media – forward from the real world to the artificial world of the mathematical model and back again from the model experiment to the real material of the economic world. The model...

The insufficiency of validity Mainstream economics is at its core in the story-telling business whereby economic theorists create make-believe analogue models of the target system – usually conceived as the real economic system. This modelling activity is considered useful and essential. Since fully-fledged experiments on a societal scale as a rule are prohibitively expensive, ethically indefensible or unmanageable, economic theorists have to substitute...

Mainstream economics — a vending machine view The theory is a vending machine: you feed it input in certain prescribed forms for the desired output; it gurgitates for a while; then it drops out the sought-for representation, plonk, on the tray, fully formed, as Athena from the brain of Zeus. This image of the relation of theory to the models we use to represent the world is hard to fit with what we know of how science works. When applying deductivist...

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Feynman’s integral trick (student stuff) .[embedded content] I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. [It] showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign – it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. [If]...

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Social scientists pursue a variety of different purposes such as predicting events of interest, explaining individual events or general phenomena, and controlling outcomes for policy. It is interesting to note that the language of“cause” is employed in all these contexts … What kind of causal hypothesis should be investigated (and, in tandem, what kind of evidence should be sought) therefore is to be determined on the basis of purpose pursued in the given context. For certain...

.[embedded content] The economic implications of gender discrimination are most serious. To deny women is to deprive a country of labor​ and talent, but — even worse — to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such wise that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment … To be sure, any society will have its achievers no matter what, if only because it has its own division...