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description= 15 posts published by Lars Syll during September 2017;
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oadable publications gretl why game theory will be nothing but a footnote in the history of social science 30 sep 2017 at 12 35 posted in economics comments off on why game theory will be nothing but a footnote in the history of social science nash equilibrium has since it was introduced back in the 50 s come to be the standard solution concept used by game theorists the justification for its use has mainly built on dubious and contentious assumptions like common knowledge and individuals exclusively identified as instrumentally rational and as if that wasn t enough one actually to save the holy equilibrium grail has had to further make the ridiculously unreal assumption that those individuals have consistently aligned beliefs effectively treating different individuals as incarnations of the microfoundationalist representative agent in the beginning in the 50 s and 60 s hopes were high that game theory would enhance our possibilities of understanding explaining the behaviour of interacting actors in non parametric settings and this is where we ended up a sad story indeed showing the limits of methodological individualism and instrumental rationality why not give up on the nash concept altogether why not give up the vain dream of trying to understand social interaction by reducing it to something that can be analyzed within a grotesquely unreal model of instrumentally interacting identical robot imitations we believe that a variety of contributory factors can be identified it is possible that the strange philosophical moorings of neoclassical economics and game theory have played a part they are strange in at least two respects the first is a kind of amnesia or lobotomy which the discipline seems to have suffered regarding most things philosophical during the postwar period the second is the utilitarian historical roots of modern economics thirdly the sociology of the discipline may provide further clues all academics have fought their corner in battles over resources and they always use the special qualities of their discipline as ammunition in one way or another thus one might explain in functionalist terms the mystifying attachments of economics and game theory to nash half a century ago there was widespread hopes game theory would provide a unified theory of all social science today it has become obvious those hopes did not materialize this ought to come as no surprise reductionist and atomistic models of social interaction such as the ones neoclassical mainstream economics is founded on can never deliver good building blocks for a realist and relevant social science rational expectations the triumph of ideology over science 29 sep 2017 at 18 53 posted in economics 2 comments research shows not only that individuals sometimes act differently than standard economic theories predict but that they do so regularly systematically and in ways that can be understood and interpreted through alternative hypotheses competing with those utilised by orthodox economists to most market participants and indeed ordinary observers this does not seem like big news in fact this irrationality is no news to the economics profession either john maynard keynes long ago described the stock market as based not on rational individuals struggling to uncover market fundamentals but as a beauty contest in which the winner is the one who guesses best what the judges will say adam smith s invisible hand the idea that free markets lead to efficiency as if guided by unseen forces is invisible at least in part because it is not there for more than 20 years economists were enthralled by so called rational expectations models which assumed that all participants have the same if not perfect information and act perfectly rationally that markets are perfectly efficient that unemployment never exists except when caused by greedy unions or government minimum wages and where there is never any credit rationing that such models prevailed especially in america s graduate schools despite evidence to the contrary bears testimony to a triumph of ideology over science unfortunately students of these graduate programmes now act as policymakers in many countries and are trying to implement programmes based on the ideas that have come to be called market fundamentalism good science recognises its limitations but the prophets of rational expectations have usually shown no such modesty joseph stiglitz those who want to build macroeconomics on microfoundations usually maintain that the only robust policies and institutions are those based on rational expectations and representative actors as yours truly has tried to show in on the use and misuse of theories and models in economics there is really no support for this conviction at all on the contrary if we want to have anything of interest to say on real economies financial crisis and the decisions and choices real people make it is high time to place macroeconomic models building on representative actors and rational expectations microfoundations in the dustbin of pseudo science for if this microfounded macroeconomics has nothing to say about the real world and the economic problems out there why should we care about it the final court of appeal for macroeconomic models is the real world and as long as no convincing justification is put forward for how the inferential bridging de facto is made macroeconomic modelbuilding is little more than hand waving that give us a rather little warrant for making inductive inferences from models to real world target systems if substantive questions about the real world are being posed it is the formalistic mathematical representations utilized to analyze them that have to match reality not the other way around the real macroeconomic challenge is to accept uncertainty and still try to explain why economic transactions take place instead of simply conjuring the problem away by assuming rational expectations and treating uncertainty as if it was possible to reduce it to stochastic risk that is scientific cheating and it has been going on for too long now share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky hicks on neoclassical uncertainty laundering 28 sep 2017 at 09 56 posted in economics comments off on hicks on neoclassical uncertainty laundering to understand real world non routine decisions and unforeseeable changes in behaviour ergodic probability distributions are of no avail in a world full of genuine uncertainty where real historical time rules the roost the probabilities that ruled the past are not necessarily those that will rule the future when we cannot accept that the observations along the time series available to us are independent we have in strict logic no more than one observation all of the separate items having to be taken together for the analysis of that the probability calculus is useless it does not apply i am bold enough to conclude from these considerations that the usefulness of statistical or stochastic methods in economics is a good deal less than is now conventionally supposed we should always ask ourselves before we apply them whether they are appropriate to the problem in hand very often they are not the probability calculus is no excuse for forgetfulness john hicks causality in economics 1979 121 time to abandon statistical significance 27 sep 2017 at 10 55 posted in statistics econometrics 6 comments we recommend dropping the nhst null hypothesis significance testing paradigm and the p value thresholds associated with it as the default statistical paradigm for research publication and discovery in the biomedical and social sciences specifically rather than allowing statistical signicance as determined by p 0 05 or some other statistical threshold to serve as a lexicographic decision rule in scientic publication and statistical decision making more broadly as per the status quo we propose that the p value be demoted from its threshold screening role and instead treated continuously be considered along with the neglected factors such factors as prior and related evidence plausibility of mechanism study design and data quality real world costs and benefits novelty of finding and other factors that vary by research domain as just one among many pieces of evidence we make this recommendation for three broad reasons first in the biomedical and social sciences the sharp point null hypothesis of zero effect and zero systematic error used in the overwhelming majority of applications is generally not of interest because it is generally implausible second the standard use of nhst to take the rejection of this straw man sharp point null hypothesis as positive or even definitive evidence in favor of some preferredalternative hypothesis is a logical fallacy that routinely results in erroneous scientic reasoning even by experienced scientists and statisticians third p value and other statistical thresholds encourage researchers to study and report single comparisons rather than focusing on the totality of their data and results andrew gelman et al as shown over and over again when significance tests are applied people have a tendency to read not disconfirmed as probably confirmed standard scientific methodology tells us that when there is only say a 10 probability that pure sampling error could account for the observed difference between the data and the null hypothesis it would be more reasonable to conclude that we have a case of disconfirmation especially if we perform many independent tests of our hypothesis and they all give about the same 10 result as our reported one i guess most researchers would count the hypothesis as even more disconfirmed we should never forget that the underlying parameters we use when performing significance tests are model constructions our p values mean nothing if the model is wrong and most importantly statistical significance tests do not validate models in journal articles a typical regression equation will have an intercept and several explanatory variables the regression output will usually include an f test with p 1 degrees of freedom in the numerator and n p in the denominator the null hypothesis will not be stated the missing null hypothesis is that all the coefficients vanish except the intercept if f is significant that is often thought to validate the model mistake the f test takes the model as given significance only means this if the model is right and the coefficients are 0 it is very unlikely to get such a big f statistic logically there are three possibilities on the table i an unlikely event occurred ii or the model is right and some of the coefficients differ from 0 iii or the model is wrong so neoliberal ethics 26 sep 2017 at 13 20 posted in politics society 3 comments as we all know neoliberalism is nothing but a self serving con endorsing pernicious moral cynicism but it s still sickening to read its gobsmacking trash maintaining that unregulated capitalism is a superlatively moral system the rich man may feast on caviar and champagne while the poor woman starves at his gate and she may not even take the crumbs from his table if that would deprive him of his pleasure in feeding them to his birds david gauthier morals by agreement now compare that unashamed neoliberal apologetics with what two truly great economists and liberals john maynard keynes and robert solow have to say the outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes i believe that there is social and psychological justification for significant inequalities of income and wealth but not for such large disparities as exist to day john maynard keynes general theory 1936 who could be against allowing people their just deserts but there is that matter of what is just most serious ethical thinkers distinguish between deservingness and happenstance deservingness has to be rigorously earned you do not deserve that part of your income that comes from your parents wealth or connections or for that matter their dna you may be born just plain gorgeous or smart or tall and those characteristics add to the market value of your marginal product but not to your deserts it may be impractical to separate effort from happenstance numerically but that is no reason to confound them especially when you are thinking about taxation and redistribution that is why we want to temper the wind to the shorn lamb and let it blow on the sable coat robert solow journal of economic perspectives 2014 public debt an economic necessity 26 sep 2017 at 09 06 posted in economics 6 comments we are not going to get out of the economic doldrums as long as we continue to be obsessed with the unreasoned ideological goal of reducing the so called deficit the deficit is not an economic sin but an economic necessity the administration is trying to bring the titanic into harbor with a canoe paddle while congress is arguing over whether to use an oar or a paddle and the perot s and budget balancers seem eager to lash the helm hard a starboard towards the iceberg some of the argument seems to be over which foot is the better one to shoot ourselves in we have the resources in terms of idle manpower and idle plants to do so much while the preachers of austerity most of whom are in little danger of themselves suffering any serious consequences keep telling us to tighten our belts and refrain from using the resources that lay idle all around us alexander hamilton once wrote a national debt if it be not excessive would be for us a national treasure william jennings bryan used to declaim you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold today s cross is not made of gold but is concocted of a web of obfuscatory financial rectitude from which human values have been expunged william vickrey share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on x opens in new window x share on bluesky opens in new window bluesky right wing extremist party in german parliament for the first time since wwii 25 sep 2017 at 13 57 posted in politics society comments off on right wing extremist party in german parliament for the first time since wwii trump s alternative facts exported to german politics seven sins of economics 23 sep 2017 at 11 44 posted in economics 4 comments there has always been some level of scepticism about the ability of economists to offer meaningful predictions and prognosis about economic and social phenomenon that scepticism has heightened in the wake of the global financial crisis leading to what is arguably the biggest credibility crisis the discipline has faced in the modern era some of the criticisms against economists are misdirected but the major thrust of the criticisms does have bite there are seven key failings or the seven sins as i am going to call them that have led economists to their cu...
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