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Naa. The paper came out in 2010, after much of the austerity debate had already crystallised, and got attention almost entirely in the US, which hasn't really

by Lazare 14y ago

Naa. The paper came out in 2010, after much of the austerity debate had already crystallised, and got attention almost entirely in the US, which hasn't really implemented austerity. (No, the sequester really doesn't count.) Nor did the paper argue strongly in favour of austerity; the authors actually are pro-stimulus, and Rogoff in particular was very concerned over the effects of the Fiscal Cliff. Actual austerity has mostly happened in Europe, where nobody really cared about the paper. The average German voter has no idea who Reinhart and Rogoff are, and he certainly doesn't care that some model showed that further loans to Greece might be correlated with somewhat lower Greek growth in the future; he's sick of the bailouts, thinks Greeks are congenitally lazy, and is afraid Germany won't get their loans back. In fact, what has actually happened in Greece is pretty much what Reinhart and Rogoff warned against! (Debt loads get too high, bond markets freak, growth craters. It's the most obvious explanation for the correlation Reinhart and Rogoff noted, and it's pretty much exactly what happened in Europe.) Meanwhile, the actual spreadsheet errors changed their results from growth of -0.1% in high-debt countries to 0.2%; an inconsequential change. Nor is this surprising; the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there. TL;DR: Reinhart and Rogoff caused austerity? Lolwut?

pessimizer 14y ago
>The average German voter has no idea who Reinhart and Rogoff are No average voter knows who Reinhart and Rogoff are, and no one is making any argument that they do, or that that matters. >the actual spreadsheet errors changed their results from growth of -0.1% in high-debt countries to 0.2%; an inconsequential change. So the 0.3% percent error was caused by incompetence at using a computer, and another 1.9% was caused by economic incompetence (equal weighting for all time periods) and deception (throwing away the first few years of data to create a convenient start date.) Is your defense that they were worse at economics than at Excel? >the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there. You've made this up. No one could reproduce their results. Parent TL;DR: The paper didn't matter, because even though its purported evidence was wrongly conceived and badly executed, its conclusion is still right because it comports with what I have decided is common sense.
slikts 14y ago
> Nor is this surprising; the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there. The data Reinhart and Rogoff used hadn't been analysed together before so their work was original, and it got widely cited. The results failed to be reproducible, and now the analysis has been found to have multiple methodological errors, of which the spreadsheet error is just a minor component. Reinhart and Rogoff didn't cause austerity, but they published a high impact paper supporting austerity that has now been discredited. Also, it would be interesting to know how you get the impression that their results "agree broadly with every other paper and model out there".
- bromang 14y ago
  I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?
  - slikts 14y ago
    There's a difference between "papers" and "every other paper". Instead of a consensus, economists are split into camps over the question whether austerity harms or improves economic growth. There's been criticism of austerity even from the IMF, for instance. Discrediting Reinhart and Rogoff's paper (published without peer-review, by the way) in particular is important because they were the first to collect and analyse data from so many sources and their results couldn't be replicated and are now shown to be incorrect.

by Lazare 14y ago

pessimizer 14y ago

>The average German voter has no idea who Reinhart and Rogoff are No average voter knows who Reinhart and Rogoff are, and no one is making any argument that they do, or that that matters. >the actual spreadsheet errors changed their results from growth of -0.1% in high-debt countries to 0.2%; an inconsequential change. So the 0.3% percent error was caused by incompetence at using a computer, and another 1.9% was caused by economic incompetence (equal weighting for all time periods) and deception (throwing away the first few years of data to create a convenient start date.) Is your defense that they were worse at economics than at Excel? >the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there. You've made this up. No one could reproduce their results. Parent TL;DR: The paper didn't matter, because even though its purported evidence was wrongly conceived and badly executed, its conclusion is still right because it comports with what I have decided is common sense.

slikts 14y ago

> Nor is this surprising; the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there. The data Reinhart and Rogoff used hadn't been analysed together before so their work was original, and it got widely cited. The results failed to be reproducible, and now the analysis has been found to have multiple methodological errors, of which the spreadsheet error is just a minor component. Reinhart and Rogoff didn't cause austerity, but they published a high impact paper supporting austerity that has now been discredited. Also, it would be interesting to know how you get the impression that their results "agree broadly with every other paper and model out there".

bromang 14y ago
I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?
- slikts 14y ago
  There's a difference between "papers" and "every other paper". Instead of a consensus, economists are split into camps over the question whether austerity harms or improves economic growth. There's been criticism of austerity even from the IMF, for instance. Discrediting Reinhart and Rogoff's paper (published without peer-review, by the way) in particular is important because they were the first to collect and analyse data from so many sources and their results couldn't be replicated and are now shown to be incorrect.