Lars P. Syll

Big Data — a critical realist perspective .[embedded content]

The dangers of randomization idolatry How, then, can social scientists best make inferences about causal effects? One option is true experimentation … Random assignment ensures that any differences in outcomes between the groups are due either to chance error or to the causal effect … If the experiment were to be repeated over and over, the groups would not differ, on average, in the values of potential confounders. Thus, the average of the average...

Statistical significance and effect size (student stuff) .[embedded content]

Although I never believed it when I was young and held scholars in great respect, it does seem to be the case that ideology plays a large role in economics. How else to explain Chicago’s acceptance of not only general equilibrium but a particularly simplified version of it as ‘true’ or as a good enough approximation to the truth? Or how to explain the belief that the only correct models are linear and that the von Neuman prices are those to which actual prices converge pretty...

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī .[embedded content]

Leverage is a measure of the degree to which a single observation on the right-hand-side variable takes on extreme values and is influential in estimating the slope of the regression line. A concentration of leverage in even a few observations can make coefficients and standard errors extremely volatile and even bias robust standard errors towards zero, leading to higher rejection rates. To illustrate this problem, Young (2019) went through a simple exercise. He collected...

The Gray Ghost (personal) [embedded content] For my daughter Tora and son David — with whom, when they were just little kids, yours truly spent hours and hours watching this​ series back in the 1990s. You were my heroes then. You still are.

How to tame inflation .[embedded content]

Regeringen och Riksbanken hanterar inflationen fel Vad beror den ökande inflationen på? Max Jerneck (MJ): Den beror till stor del på ökade priser på energi och livsmedel, som orsakas av saker som hur elmarknaden är reglerad och torka samt kriget i Ukraina. Även priserna på möbler och andra varor, och grundläggande komponenter och insatsvaror som halvledare och stål spelar in. Under pandemin minskade efterfrågan på tjänster samtidigt som den snabbt ökade...

The Law of Demand Mainstream economics is usually considered to be very ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise.’ And yes, indeed, it’s certainly full of ‘rigorous’ and ‘precise’ statements like “the state of the economy will remain the same as long as it doesn’t change.” Although ‘true,’ this is, however — like most other analytical statements — neither particularly interesting nor informative. As is well known, the law of demand is usually tagged with a clause that...