Lars P. Syll

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 …

Spending a beautiful summer afternoon with my lovely daughters, Linnea and Tora. . [embedded content]

On statistics and causality Ironically, the need for a theory of causation began to surface at the same time that statistics came into being … This was a critical moment in the history of science. The opportunity to equip causal questions with a language of their own came very close to being realized but was squandered. In the following years, these questions were declared unscientific and went underground. Despite heroic efforts by the geneticist Sewall...

Should we save capitalism? .[embedded content]