Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Lars P. Syll — ‘Rigorous’ evidence can be worse than useless


Department of doh!
"…the literature provides a compelling case that policymakers interested in minimizing the error of their parameter estimates would do well to prioritize careful thinking about local evidence over rigorously-estimated causal effects from the wrong context." —Lant Pritchett & Justin Sandefur
Solving the wrong problem.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
‘Rigorous’ evidence can be worse than useless
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

1 comment:

Matt Franko said...

"These findings imply that the common practice of ranking evidence by its level of “rigor”,
without respect to context, may produce misleading policy recommendations …"

Well the Pickety/Saez data certainly is rigorous, but here is the context:

"Income defined as annual gross income reported on tax returns excluding all government transfers (such as Social Security, Unemployment Benefits, Welfare Payments, etc.) and before individual income taxes and employees' payroll taxes."

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2012prel.xls


I think it would be of value to show how much households are actually "taking home" vs how much is being siphoned off by the morons to be implementing "paygo"... and what value/impact the xfer payments are having on our US economy and hence their importance and why we would want to advocate for sustaining them if not meaningful increases...

I dont know what this data is illustrating... it seems devoid of anything meaningful to any of the actual human beings involved...

People have to deal with the "take home pay" the 'tax and spend' morons are foisting upon them.... and Social Security and Unemployment Insurance transfer payment recipients as well as the economy are better off for them...

Again I dont see what reality the data is illustrating....