Lars P. Syll

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Östra kyrkogården i Lund är en plats som alltid betytt mycket för mig. Hit har jag kommit många gånger för att söka tröst och vila för min själ. Tre av de människor jag älskat mest i mitt liv ligger begravda här — min älskade Kristina, min bror Peter, och min vän Bengt. [embedded content]

An easy one this week: At a small economics conference, a photographer wants to line up nine participants for a photo. Two of them — Robert and Milton — insist on standing next to each other. How many different arrangements (lineups) are possible?

Da doo ron ron .[embedded content]

Three pages — all it takes to change science forever .[embedded content] And here is Edmund Gettier’s three pages article.

The one logic lecture mainstream economists did not attend .[embedded content] Using formal mathematical modelling, mainstream economists sure can guarantee that the conclusions hold given the assumptions. However the validity we get in abstract model worlds does not warrant transfer to real-world economies. Validity may be good, but it is not enough. Mainstream economists are proud of having an ever-growing smorgasbord of models to cherry-pick from (as...

Necessary and sufficient (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Is economics nothing but a library of models? Chameleons arise and are often nurtured by the following dynamic. First a bookshelf model is constructed that involves terms and elements that seem to have some relation to the real world and assumptions that are not so unrealistic that they would be dismissed out of hand. The intention of the author, let’s call him or her “Q,” in developing the model may be to say something about the real world or the goal may...

Chebyshev’s and Markov’s Inequality Theorems Chebyshev’s Inequality Theorem — named after Russian mathematician Pafnuty Chebyshev (1821-1894) — states that for a population (or sample) at most 1/k2 of the distribution’s values can be more than k standard deviations away from the mean. The beauty of the theorem is that although we may not know the exact distribution of the data — e.g. if it’s normally distributed  — we may still say with certitude (since the...

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