Lars P. Syll

To Ukraine with love .[embedded content] To my brothers and sisters in Ukraine.

Frank Ramsey — a portrait and a critique .[embedded content] Mainstream economics nowadays usually assumes that agents that have to make choices under conditions of uncertainty behave according to Bayesian rules, axiomatized by Ramsey (1931) and Savage (1954) — that is, they maximize expected utility with respect to some subjective probability measure that is continually updated according to Bayes theorem. If not, they are supposed to be irrational, and...

De Finetti on the dangers of mathematization Let us bear in mind …that everything is based on distinctions which are themselves uncertain and vague, and which we conventionally translate into terms of certainty only because of the logical formulation … In the mathematical formulation of any problem it is necessary to base oneself on some appropriate idealizations and simplification. This is, however, a disadvantage; it is a distorting factor which one...

Yanis Varoufakis on the irrelevance of mainstream economics .[embedded content] Varoufakis is undoubtedly right — there is indeed something about the way mainstream economists construct their models that obviously doesn’t sit right. One might have hoped that humbled by the manifest failure of its theoretical pretences during the latest economic-financial crises, the one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modelling as the only...

Windfall tax on oil companies .[embedded content]

How to battle inflation .[embedded content]

Summer in the city .[embedded content] One of my favorite songs of the ’60s. It still makes me happy when I hear it.

‘Overcontrolling’ in statistical studies You see it all the time in studies. “We controlled for…” And then the list starts … The more things you can control for, the stronger your study is — or, at least, the stronger your study seems. Controls give the feeling of specificity, of precision. But sometimes, you can control for too much. Sometimes you end up controlling for the thing you’re trying to measure … An example is research around the gender wage gap,...

Economics and the law of the hammer .[embedded content] As yours truly has reported repeatedly during the last couple of years, university students all over the world are increasingly beginning to question if the kind of economics they are taught — mainstream economics — really is of any value. Some have even started to question if economics is a science. My own take on the issue is that economics — and especially mainstream economics — has lost immensely...

Nights in white satin .[embedded content] On revient toujours à ses premières amours …