Cry me a river, Rogoff and Reinhart:
Last week, three economists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, released a paper criticizing our findings. They correctly identified a spreadsheet coding error that led us to miscalculate the growth rates of highly indebted countries since World War II. But they also accused us of “serious errors” stemming from “selective exclusion” of relevant data and “unconventional weighting” of statistics — charges that we vehemently dispute. (In an online-only appendix accompanying this essay, we explain the methodological and technical issues that are in dispute.)
Our research, and even our credentials and integrity, have been furiously attacked in newspapers and on television. Each of us has received hate-filled, even threatening, e-mail messages, some of them blaming us for layoffs of public employees, cutbacks in government services and tax increases.
The goal of their piece is to claim that they didn’t ever say there was a 90% tipping point. What do their fee-fees have to do with that?
(via)
Baud
When they condemn the GOP for using their research, maybe I’ll care about their feefees a little.
Eric U.
I think they have been blaming people for using their findings the way they did, but having written a book following up, I don’t think that’s really going to stick
Walker
You get what you deserve when you use your work to influence policy without independent verification. That is ideology, not science (or at least in this case, empiricism).
MikeJ
I’ve heard threats about people being raped to death with a keyboard because they used the wrong indentation style in a program. These precious snowflakes need to buck the fuck up.
beltane
OMG, someone sent them mean emails! A bit of fresh air from the outside has penetrated their bubble of privilege. The horror, the horror!
Zagloba
But were they doing so before last week?
I dunno, I can’t help but think I would have heard from Krugman or Delong if these two had pulled a McLuhan on the GOP at any point in the last four years.
Snarki, child of Loki
“Once your colleagues discover that 90% of the result in your most important publication is bullshit, there’s a tipping point.”
Derelict
Let’s see: Their “findings” have been used worldwide to discard 70 years of successful Keynesian economics and impose the new austerity measures that placate the confidence fairy. The resulting unemployment of hundreds of millions of people to benefit the richest 1% on the planet has caused unspeakable misery.
Yet, these braintrusts just can’t understand why anyone would be mad that them?
NonyNony
This is crap. When I was in grad school it was beaten into us – if you publish sloppy work or, worse, you publish dishonest work, you are going to get raked across the coals for it eventually[*]. You will get caught out because experiments and analysis need to be replicable and if it can’t be replicated it’s your reputation that gets burned.
This is the process working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Their reputation should be getting questioned because clearly they have turned out shoddy, indefensible work. Their reputations would be raised quite a bit if they took a step back, admitted that yes as it turns out they were not only sloppy, but they let ideological biases fuel their research, and attempt to redo their analysis in a more neutral manner. As it stands, their work cannot be trusted again possibly ever because they refuse to confront these basic facts.
[*] Of course this is aspirational. If your name is big enough you can publish whatever crap you want and so long as you don’t get caught out actively falsifying data, your reputation won’t take a hit. But the only way to get your name that big and trusted is to generate a large body of work of unquestioned quality, so at the macro level it should shake out, even if you do get a few fools who go off the rails once they’ve made their names…
mai naem
Well, considering that thousands of people have committed suicide in Europe because of the policies that these two have advocated, it would be okay by me if these hate emails cause these two to commit suicide.
EconWatcher
As many others have pointed out, their paper itself was filled with appropriately cautious academic language, and that’s what they point to now. But they did a whole lot of shilling before Congress and elsewhere, throwing caution to the wind and claiming that their paper proved we were at some kind of critical inflection point where more debt could destroy the economy. They deserve whatever they get (except violence, of course).
There’s an additional irony here that I haven’t seen anyone point out. The economics department at UMass Amherst is not a “respectable” econ department. More than any other large econ department in the country, it is filled with Marxists, post-Keynesians, and other “heterodox” economists, typically associated with the Union for Radical Political Economists (URPE). Look up Stephen Resnick, Rick Wolff, Herb Gintis, Samuel Bowles–all were associated with building that program. Robert Pollin, who helped expose the Reinhart/Rogoff errors, is very much in that school.
Respectable economists have long shunned that department as a bunch of hippie/leftie types who are really doing sociology and aren’t real economists at all. It’s not rigorous, it’s not quantitative, it’s political polemic masquerading as economics–that’s what they say about the econ department at UMass.
So having this crew at UMass Amherst be the ones to expose their error–wow, that’s gotta hurt. Bad.
And while Pollin and company have been studiously polite and professional in public, I can only imagine the high-fiving going on over there at UMass.
El Cid
Fuck them. Go to fucking hell.
At every god-damned job I’ve worked at I’ve had more consequences riding on my shoulders for serious errors than they did for work which had consequences threatening the livelihoods (and even lives) of tens of millions of people around the world.
You want to play in the intellectual sphere? Then you have the fucking responsibility to check your fucking work and open it up so others can too.
Here, let’s put this more in terms of Glengarry Glen Ross.
You have a nice career? Fuck you. Your students like you? Catch a cab right now and go the fuck home. You enjoy prestigious invitations to testify publicly for your shitty ideas? God bless you, and go the fuck home. That’s it, you’re through.
Put that paper down. Papers are for closers. You’re a loser.
Ian
@Derelict:
Well, that covers all I came in here to say. Right wingers really seem to not understand that punching someone in the face means that they have to apologize. It’s not on the punch-ee for hurting the punchers hand.
The untold misery caused by their mistakes completely justifies any reaction short of physical violence.
Ben Franklin
It’s just your standard market manipulation. They play with your play money.
It’s as old as grannies tit
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425?print=true
Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:
SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?…
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?…
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome
El Cid
@EconWatcher: Of course, there’s a difference between quantitative analysis and quantitationist analysis — in one, you use numbers and equations where they apply and when they tell you useful information about the world, and in the other, you use numbers and equations in ways that make you feel like they’re telling you important information about the world. One is a scientifically-minded search for the truth, one is a stylistic approach to look impressive in pursuing ideas you prefer.
El Cid
@Ian: I seem to recall a nice lawyer apologizing for getting in the way of poor Dick Cheney’s shotgun pellets zooming on their way to their intended targets of drugged & released small birds.
Napoleon
@EconWatcher:
I saw somewhere on the internet the last few days a longish piece which pointed this out in so many words, and how that department came to be that way.
Villago Delenda Est
@NonyNony:
“But, but, we’re big deal economists now who gave the Rethuglicans exactly what they needed to push their fucked up notions of the way the world works on everyone!”
Fucking ideological asshats. Welcome to reality, motherfuckers.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@EconWatcher:
What distinguishes them from say George Mason or Chicago?
300baud
Oh golly, I guess they forgot to link to the previous NYT editorial where they told off the austerians for misinterpreting and overusing their work.
And of course they don’t mention the fact that their initial refusal to share their data and methods let the error sit out their for years unchecked, turning this into a much bigger deal.
There’s a great post from academic blogger Austin Frakt on this called “The Unavoidable Riskiness of Fame”: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/the-unavoidable-riskiness-of-fame/
Basically, his take is that the higher you go, the harder you fall, inand that there’s a conflict between doing good academic work and being famous, in that fame encourages you to speak in sound bites and to invest in positions.
Reinhart and Rogoff took the good, and surely understood that there paper was influencing people’s lives. They can now take the richly deserved bad for producing a low-grade paper and letting the elite use it to beat the poor.
EconWatcher
@El Cid:
Yes, and that’s the big problem with a whole lot of conventional economics. They make simplifying assumptions not because they are actually justifiable as a reasonable approximation of the world, but because the assumptions enable them to do mathematical modeling. They assume away the actual problems of the real world. And then they offer policy prescriptions based on their models.
EconWatcher
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
IOKIYAR. That’s the critical distinction.
NotMax
No policy should ever be crafted on the basis of a single study.
Cassidy
These guys have ruined lives. If some disaffected worker who is now unemployed, divorced, and dying because of no healthcare were to show up and perpetrate violence, it wouldn’t be a huge loss and I wouldn’t feel bad for them.
Cassidy
@EconWatcher: At that level, isn’t Econmoics and Sociology like PB&J? You gotta have one with the other.
Villago Delenda Est
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
“Wrong” kind of ideological slant.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cassidy:
I agree.
Galtian assholes deserve no mercy whatsoever.
gogol's wife
I couldn’t read the piece, but the comments are quite good.
Rex Everything
They’re not only whiners, they’re completely full of shit. Yes they faked the numbers, yes they abused the weighting of the stats. Obviously. They can “vehemently dispute” it all they want; the fact is they did it, they were certainly rewarded for it, and now they have to lie down in the bed they made. Now they don’t like it? Fuck them.
Maude
Oops. They got caught.
EconWatcher
@Rex Everything:
To me, the big tell was the New Zealand part: They included one year in which New Zealand had negative 7.6 percent growth with a high debt load, and forgot to include four other years when New Zealand had much higher growth with a similar debt load.
I guess it’s easier to point and laugh at the excel coding error, but that was just a sloppy goof. The New Zealand thing seems like much clearer evidence of good old-fashioned bad faith.
Unfortunately, I think we’ll find out once again that anything can be forgiven, if your errors helped the right side. If this were Krugman, he’d be tarred and feathered, but I suspect these two will recover quite nicely.
MattF
Yglesias gives them what-for:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/26/reinhart_rogoff_respond_unpersuasively_to_their_critics.html
I guess ‘unpersuasive’ is an acceptable way of saying ‘dishonest’.
Joel
If economics were a hard science, these guys would be issuing a retraction and an apology. If there was any finding of malfeasance in their data manipulation, they might have lost their jobs, tenure or no.
NotMax
@EconWatcher
So too was the complete exclusion of Canada, the U.S.’ largest trading partner.
Mark
I always get Rogoff and Reinhart confused. Which one got attacked by the tiger?
EconWatcher
By the way, their whining is indeed offensive. But when you think about it, they can’t really apologize and stay in their current positions, promising to do better next time.
This is so colossal, given how much their work was cited in the debates over austerity, that they’ve really got two choices: Try to ride it out, or apologize abjectly and resign from their positions. There really is no middle ground.
They’ve obviously decided to go with Option A. And they’ll probably get away with it.
Villago Delenda Est
@gogol’s wife:
The comments are devastating. They’re pulling these two twits over the coals there, on multiple fronts…failure to peer review, giving shitstains like Ryan precisely what they needed and not cautioning them that their work wasn’t a definitive endorsement of austerity.
These guys became rock stars for Randian assholes and now they’ve got a hangover from too much blow.
jrg
Private enterprise doesn’t provide tenure precisely because that would prevent them from firing people who make mistakes this big.
ETA: Maybe “complicate efforts to” would be better wording than “prevent”.
weaselone
@EconWatcher:
So the UMass Amherst econ department is the left wing equivalent of Chicago and Syracuse without the undeserved credibility?
Itinerant Pedant
@EconWatcher: I took an Intro to Political Econ from Bowles when I was at Umass in 1986. Couldn’t agree with you more. The guys there did as much quant as anyone at the much more orthodox UIowa Econ dept where I got my MBA (true story, the macro guy there went to the Hoover Institution the year after I had him and he mainly used the quant equivalent of crayon doodles on a napkin). Basically the freshwater guys like to PRETEND to mathematical rigor, but the neo-Keynesian and Marxist Econ guys actually know their stuff. They just also understand all those pretty equations are at best approximations.
Really proud of the UMass Econ Department now.
RSA
Reinhart and Rogoff today: How could you think we were saying that 90% was a tipping point, or that high debt causes slow growth? That’s crazy talk.
Rogoff in June, 2012:
EconWatcher
@Itinerant Pedant:
My mentor in college had his PhD from UMass, and he was the coolest dude in the econ department. They’re ambidextrous–they can do all of the conventional econ stuff, and teach it better than anyone, and then they can tear it apart and show all the hidden ideological assumptions and simplifications.
Plus, they’ve resurrected all of these really interesting economic thinkers from the past who’ve been abandoned by the conventional profession–Kalecki, Sraffa, Joan Robinson, etc.
Omnes Omnibus
@jrg: Private enterprise and academia have different missions.
GregB
Colbert mocked these two shitheels by never getting their names right.
So two cheers for Jagoff and Beerfart.
jrg
@Omnes Omnibus: Agreed, but it’s entertaining to me that some of the most high-profile priests of austerity would get canned if they weren’t in a sheltered ivory tower.
mai naem
I didn’t know much about the authors about the criticism of the original study beyond that it was an Excel error. It must burn that it’s a grad student who found the error. Freaking hilarious. And that his professor initially wasn’t going to let him use the topic in a paper because the math was too simple.
http://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-herndon-replication-exercise-2013-4
Villago Delenda Est
@RSA:
Don’t these dipshits understand that their words in fucking OP-EDS can be used against them in a court of public opinion?
Rogoff should be laughed off any stage, but he’ll still be a rock star to the Galtians, for giving them exactly what they needed…”academic cover” for their vile ideology.
LosGatosCA
Shitty people do shitty things then cry when other people point out that their work is shit.
It’s beyond pathetic. But luckily, they have great careers ahead of them at Faux News and Heritage.
PeakVT
Our research, and even our credentials and integrity, have been furiously attacked in newspapers and on television.
Well, if you don’t like being called a dishonest, incompetent piece of shit, don’t be one, and don’t be one in a way that leaves a big fat trail of evidence.
JustMe
Honestly, there is no shame in having made an error, or even being wrong about their conclusions. But testifying before Congress to publicize their research and advocate for austerity, allowing themselves to be used as justification for auterity, writing those op-ed favoring budget cuts, and registering with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau is all on them, and they’re being rightfully pilloried for being media whores who caused other people to suffer.
Gin & Tonic
@Villago Delenda Est: Apparently they’ve written a response to some of the comments, but I can’t read that because of NYT “issues.” This must be a bunch of fun for those two right now.
JPL
@Villago Delenda Est: I couldn’t agree more. Most of the comments are devastating. The oped piece was neither an apology nor a defense. It was a useless piece of prose trying to salvage their reputation.
PeakVT
Krugman rips into Bartles and James again.
liberal
@jrg:
Like all the banksters did?
Pongo
@GregB: The Colbert bit was fantastic. It managed to convey a lot of info, but still be bitingly funny. One thing it missed was the connection between these two and billionaire Pete Peterson’s ‘small government, tax cuts for the wealthy activism.’ They are hardly ‘independent’ economic intellectuals.
The other shocking thing about this is how a paper that was never subjected to peer review managed to be so influential.
liberal
@EconWatcher:
Yeah.
liberal
@EconWatcher:
I completely agree, but that critique doesn’t really apply here, does it? I thought this was basically a 5th grade computation of a correlation using Excel, and little more. What’s the actual model?
liberal
@Pongo:
True, though there’s plenty of peer-reviewed economics that’s just crap. Think “real business cycle theory”.
EconWatcher
@Pongo:
I’ve been scratching my head, trying to remember if there’s ever been another instance where an academic, purportedly empirical finding had so much influence in policy circles, and then was discredited this profoundly. Can anyone think of another time? This seems completely unprecedented. Amazing, really.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
Agreed, but the crowd that Rogoff is shilling for isn’t really the Galtians; it’s the Austerians, which are in essence a different crowd. The Galtians favor austerity only derivative to their complete opposition to government.
Schlemizel
Does everyone here know that their original work was NEVER PEER REVIEWED? Does everyone also know that they have refused to release their original work at all? That the kid who exposed them had contacted them & when they refused to provide the data he went ahead and recreated it himself?
These 2 fuckers deserve to have more than their feelings hurt – their employment prospects should be crippled. In an honest world these clowns would be ostracized by their peers and the shaved apes that used their work to justify the mass scale destruction they have accomplished should apologize and start over to fix the damage they have done
Leo Artunian
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS): You must have missed the phrase “a bunch of hippie/leftie types,” which of course means “bad.”
EconWatcher
@liberal:
I didn’t mean that critique to apply here; it was just a general comment about conventional economics.
But part of it does apply, in the sense that R-R attempted to use work that could at best show correlation as if it showed causation. That alone should have precluded austerians from relying on it. K-thug and many others were pointing this out long before the errors were discovered. The errors were really the icing on the cake, that fortuitously exposed a fraud that never should have worked anyway.
NonyNony
@Schlemizel:
The best part of this story is the fact that it was exposed because a grad student was trying to replicate their results for a class term paper.
Every graduate program in anything that does empirical research should require students at some point to replicate other people’s work. Not only does it occasionally lead to discoveries that the original work was flawed, but it also teaches students how to write better papers and how to read papers more critically. (There’s nothing like trying to replicate a paper to discover just how poorly written most papers tend to be, IMO.)
MomSense
Ok, the thing is when I first heard about their work I decided to look up the US debt to GDP ratio for the time period following WWII and discovered…tadah that in 1945 it was 113%. I thought hmmmm did that debt crush the US economy and erode confidence?? Wait we had 25+ years of “postwar economic boom” AKA the “long boom” and the “Golden Age of Capitalism”??? How on earth could this be? Very serious people assured me that just this sort of combination of high income taxes and debt would lead to disaster!!
jomo
Krugman was the next column over mocking R&R. Beautiful thing.
EconWatcher
@MomSense:
In fairness, that era was a special case, when the rest of the world was in rubble and needed our loans and capital equipment to rebuild.
But hey, if we were going to play like R-R, we could just do some rigorous analysis using only that time period, hide our data, and use the results to claim that massive debt loads throughout the business cycle generate massive economic growth.
NotMax
@liberal
So it’s a production of the Austero-Dungarian Empire?
ellie
@GregB: That was a thing of beauty!
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense:
Well, it did, from a certain point of view. It made the 1% less relevant and special. It created a huge middle class with lots of leisure time to devote to thinking about how the 1% isn’t all that relevant and special. That sounds like something akin to a disaster to me!
jrg
@liberal: Two wrongs don’t make a right.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@EconWatcher:
Seppuku was made for situations like this.
And no, I’m not waxing metaphorical. They deserve to die, if not by their own hands willingly, then at the hands of their victims perforce.
Frankensteinbeck
Even if their paper is full of hedging words, it’s a Cavuto mark backed up by an obviously defective sample selection further tainted by bad math. Yes, guys, you will be mocked in academic circles for that. Since you let your paper become important politically, you will be mocked for THAT. You have been exposed as incompetent. Suck it up.
@Schlemizel:
This part is only semi-true. I heard the kid tell the story on Colbert. Since they hadn’t released their work, he tried to reproduce it and couldn’t. He asked them to give him their work so he could figure out why, and they forgot themselves and actually did. The kid couldn’t believe the analysis was as incompetent as it looked, and started going to other people for opinions. Yes, it really was that stupid.
@NotMax:
Please accept my slow clap for this pun.
Mandalay
Not quite. Their goal is to make you believe that they never said there was a 90% tipping point, even though their paper which caused this controversy is riddled with such claims.
Check out this carefully crafted piece of sophistry in their NYT op-ed:
So in the op-ed they cite a different paper, and then claim “See! In that other paper we don’t mention that that 90 percent was a magic threshold!”.
As though that makes the original problem go away. I don’t know how they roll in academic circles, but my hope is that these bullshit artists will get pointed at, and laughed at, by their peers on a regular basis forever.
patroclus
This is, quite frankly, one of the worst examples of academic fraud that has ever occurred, and Jekyll and Hyde should pay for it. In addition to their bogus study, their reputation has been utterly trashed and they deserve every bit of calumny that comes their way. They are, quite literally, responsible for the ruination of people’s lives all over the world. They are scum. Colbert and the UMass guy nailed them and they’re going to have to live with it. This is why “peer-review” means peer review.
liberal
@EconWatcher:
Right, I know the correlation/causality bit. That was attacked pretty early on, wasn’t it?
Pongo
So, in the real world, people whose work was so roundly and justly criticized would find themselves pariahs in their field. These two (I think they are married) were What are the odds that this situation will have even the tiniest bit of negative influence on the careers of these two (I think they are married)? I’m sure they will now go on the wingnut welfare bandwagon and create a new career out of being victims of unjust leftwing attacks.
It would be interesting (and probably depressing) to track how often this paper continues to be cited in policy decisions in the future.
liberal
@jrg:
Of course not. I’m just saying that in the real world, certain people (meaning, those with darker skins, or those who actually work for a living) pay for their mistakes. But not our “betters”.
Villago Delenda Est
@Pongo:
The Koch brothers and Peterson know how to take care of their lackies, yes they do.
liberal
@Pongo:
Yeah, but their field is economics.
In the mid-1990s (1994, I think) Martin Feldstein had an op-ed saying that Clinton’s tax hikes would crush economic growth. We then had a few years of enviably high growth (at least by late-20th/early 21st century standards).
Not saying that the tax hikes caused that, but rather that Feldstein was utterly, completely wrong, and didn’t suffer a bit. Why? Because it’s economics. The only way you can suffer is perhaps if you’re a left-of-center economist.
Villago Delenda Est
@liberal:
Their opposition to government is not complete. They sill want uniformed goons around with the color of public safety to protect them from their slaves.
liberal
@patroclus:
I completely agree. But given the magnitude of impact, what about Alan Greenspan? Of all the actors in the world who had something to do with the 2008 implosion, he’s surely the most responsible, because he more than anyone else pushed the idea that financial institutions could police themselves.
Myself, I feel it’s an embarassment for our species that someone who screwed up that badly hasn’t committed suicide yet (in the best Japanese fashion). What’s worse is people in the establishment still give him an audience, when in fact anyone seeing him in person should punch him very hard in the face.
liberal
@Villago Delenda Est:
Actually, my impression is that the ones who have really, really drunk the kool-aid don’t think the state needs to have a monopoly on legitimate violence, and things would be peachy keen if individuals were free to contract with private protection forces.
liberal
@Mandalay:
Would that it were so. They belong to a profession where, in essence, a leading “Nobelist” claims that the Great Depression occurred because workers en masse decided they wanted more time off.
While IMHO a science of economics really can exist, the one we have is corrupted. If anyone can’t see that after the housing bubble collapsed—where economists as a class were exposed as a laughingstock (given that they, as a class, didn’t make loud noises about the housing bubble, which was obvious to anyone reading about the fundamentals)—then there’s no use making the point.
liberal
@NotMax:
Hah hah.
Humor aside, it’s funny how there’s the “Austrians” (followers of von Mises etc) and the “Asterians”.
liberal
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
That’s what I was referring to just above re Greenspan. The fact he hasn’t done that yet is incredible. Most people feel much more shame about much, much more minor f*ckups.
Mandalay
@RSA:
Here’s another example of them hammering away in 2011 in a Bloomberg article:
And they never challenged any of the Republicans who repeatedly cited their paper as showing that 90% was the magic number. Why? Because that is exactly what their paper claimed.
piratedan
so, let me understand this…. they’re economists and they’re having issues with cause and effect? i.e. they caused people to make grand assumptions on economic policy based on their own research and when that data is found to be of a dubious nature because they gaffed on their data sets and worksheet calcs they’re upset at being held accountable?
liberal
@NonyNony:
Yes, but having worked in an academic field, I can assure you that one enormous obstacle is that there is little incentive to do this.
IMHO it’s extremely important—that’s what our understanding of Western science tells us. But actually on the ground, if you do replication work, you’ll find it much harder to publish, because AFAICT it’s lacking in “originality”.
patroclus
@liberal: Greenspan is surely to blame as well, but at least, he was in a governmental position and has received political criticism for his actions and his statements. And he has owned his mistakes at least in part with some semi-apologies and some backwalking about his prior actions (and non-actions). When he (and Rubin and Lyman) torpedoed Brooksley Born’s public career and her efforts to regulate OTC derivatives in the 1990’s, he ushered in an era of no regulation whatsoever which, in part, led to the 2007-08 crisis – this has all been well documented. Bartels and James’s perfidies are only now coming to light – it is time to roast them over the coals – Greenspan will continue to get his throughout the remainder of history.
liberal
@EconWatcher:
Well, there’s the Laffer curve, though that wasn’t empirical but rather a simple lemma from real analysis.
liberal
@Mandalay:
Yeah, I hate that sh*t.
I remember one exchange in a blog comments section where I pointed out that if you looked at some statement Bush made about Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was clear that he was trying to imply a connection, yet cleverly did so in a manner where you couldn’t take a snippet out an catch him in a literal lie.
Scumbags all.
Joel
@liberal: yeah, but replication occurs (or doesn’t) in the “follow up” studies. Definitely true in biology.
liberal
@patroclus:
Sure, though IMHO if we measure agents by their power and the influence of their actions, Greenspan is still IMHO far more culpable. RR are vile propagandists. Greenspan is a vile actor.
He did do an about face, as you state (there’s that now-famous quote about getting it all wrong), but AFAICT he’s gone back on it now.
He can’t die a painful death soon enough.
liberal
@Joel:
Definitely not true in human biomedical research.
liberal
@EconWatcher:
This is the sort of concession to facts and nuance which will always make it harder for “us” to propagandize against the bad guys. (Not that you shouldn’t make it; it’s just something we’re stuck with.)
liberal
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
Heh.
Ruckus
@EconWatcher:
except violence, of course
Why is that exactly?
Idiot conservatives received justification for their idiotic policies. And implemented them.
Tens of millions have no jobs. Countries are in serious financial difficulty. People have even committed suicide over their lack of jobs and money. Now it’s not all because of these two idiots, but their deception has caused extreme damage to the entire world.
I’m picturing the scene in Airplane where an endless line of people waits patently to express their displeasure.
liberal
@EconWatcher:
Yeah, that stuff is fascinating. Wish I had more time to read about it.
liberal
@Ruckus:
I understand the sentiment. Reminds me of this quotes from a sci fi personality.
catclub
@MomSense: R&R counted that long boom (if the US was included at all, for all I know it was excluded for some extraneous reason, like too much yellow mustard per capita) as only one data point, instead of one for each year. Just one of their little tricks.
catclub
@liberal: Also, the Aristocrats.
Jay in Oregon
@liberal:
I’m totally okay with him being ostracized from polite society and used to frighten small children into going to bed on time as well.
Ruckus
@EconWatcher:
…excel coding error, but that was just a sloppy goof.
Considering the other “mistakes” how do you make that assumption that it is a goof?
Sorry but it sounds like you are trying to apologize for them. They are big boys, playing in a big world and they fucked up big time and got caught. They don’t want to take responsibility for their actions, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hold them fully responsible.
liberal
@Ruckus:
He’s not apologizing for them, but rather pointing out that that particular goof had a smaller impact than the other problems, and it’s also less blameworthy, in the sense that it’s a mistake as opposed to deliberately picking the data in such a way as to bend the results to the desired conclusion.
El Cid
Wouldn’t sane people have all sorts of alarm bells going off at a ridiculously pseudo-natural sciences declaration like there’s a simple fixed percentage (90%! 90% I tells ya!) threshold at which debt does X, Y, or Z?
Sure, it could happen — but that’s the sort of thing that is a really, really strong assertion of a strong mathematical relationship based in empirical reality and huge systems like economies etc. very, very rarely act so simplistically.
Nope, instead we go, ‘Uh, okay, here’s a line, it’s 90%, at which point debt’s too big and we all die, oh noez, I take it for granted, it’s good enough for me, no need to question that, seems scientificky enough, let’s go with that…’
PeakVT
@liberal: Yes, but not formally, because nobody had the data set. Now that the data is public, the causality has been shown to be the reverse of what Bangers and Mash implied.
It’s probably too fine of a point for the media to grasp, since so far they’ve focused on the spreadsheet error, but I think the failure to do any kind of test for causality is as big a problem as any of the others.
El Cid
Also, god-damnit, this same shit was carried out by just as much if not more zeal and more force upon the entire fucking 3rd world from the 1980s through the 1990s and the IMF and WB ended up repeatedly apologizing for the effects of the austerity / structural adjustment policies they promised at the time would help & were necessary.
THIS ISN’T FUCKING NEW.
(And yes, I’m aware of the Naomi Klein book, but I was also alive & conscious of such at the time.)
South America — led by a succession of Soshullist Chilean governments, Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (whose backing of Kirchner via bond-purchases made Kirchner’s change possible) pioneered saying “fuck you” to all this austerity “hey what your struggling economy needs to develop is to devote all your policies & resources to making external investors wealthy very quickly and in return we charge you massive amounts of interest on loans you’ve already repaid” bullshit, which is gone from the Southern hemisphere and yet dominant here.
MomSense
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yup! Throw in strong labor unions and you get the trifecta of destruction for the 1%.
El Cid
@PeakVT: Trust me, I am very, very thankful for the spreadsheet error, as it apparently was an accessible enough symbol to do the job. If it had entirely been more subtle dishonesties & lazy lacunae, the message might never have gone anywhere.
Ruckus
@liberal:
But given the rest of the bullshit they published and given that the only way to get there was to start at the end and work backwards, how can one say this is a goof? It’s not that hard of a mistake to even find. It would be more work to have made the mistake than to have done it properly.
PeakVT
@El Cid: Fair point.
El Cid
@Ruckus: Many people seem to have a big dividing line between them consciously using this for fraud and simply being so callously arrogant and dismissively insensitive that they arrived at wrong via incautious self-bullshitting. I don’t. They’re both equally immoral. In fact, at least in the former case you’re aware enough of the distinction between right & wrong to give a shit and then choose wrong. In the latter case, the people on the downside of your actions don’t matter enough to cause you to delay your output.
Ruckus
@El Cid:
Agreed.
Let’s look at this from their perspective. They had to start with an idea, that government debt is too high. Then to show this as true they had to find historical evidence. They found exactly the opposite so they had to cook the methodology to get the outcome they wanted. They did and then presented this to anyone who would listen, that being anyone who thinks government is always wrong(conservatives). They refused to provide any details of their work, because they knew it could easily be proven wrong. They provided a student the work when he told them he had found a spreadsheet error, probably assuming he would never be able to use the info. Oppsie.
All these steps require them to make decisions that could/would have huge negative ramifications for millions upon millions of people with millions or billions of positive ramifications for a few. How is that different than the pompous idiot son of George? Not as many people have died? So far?
rollSound
@LosGatosCA:
I’m thinking more teaching economics at Liberty or Oral Roberts.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Awww, Rollo and Reindeer are having a rough time now that they have been caught stepping on their dicks in public.
By a grad student…lol! Ouch.
Rex Everything
@EconWatcher: Exactly. THAT is fraudulent weighting, right there. That’s what it looks like.
The other tell is that every single “mistake” supported the pro-austerity narrative. Every single one. I swear, if I were pulling their con, I would at least throw in an error or two that went the other way, for plausible deniability’s sake.
liberal
@Ruckus:
I think it’s easy to make such mistakes. The blame lies in not checking the work to catch it.
But in terms of “comparing” the blameworthiness, the other “mistakes” (selective use of data) are made with clear intent. The goof, not so much, except to the extent that they got the result they wanted and then decided not to check it because of concern that checking might undermine the result being what they desired it to be.
liberal
@Ruckus:
Apart from the question of which policies killed more, the fact is that these two are propagandists, not actual agents in charge of making decisions. Bush 43 is far more culpable.
Not that they’re not plenty culpable.
liberal
@Rex Everything:
Agreed.
liberal
@rollSound:
Would that it were so.
This kind of shite just means that they’re standard high-level whoring-for-the-rich-and-powerful economists. If nothing else, it will bolster their position, since they’re taking heat for evil now.
priscianus jr
This is not just about them. This is a fight over the “intellectual” basis for the policies that currently rationalize the financial policies of nations.
Ruckus
I agree with El Cid.
Too many people here are trying to lessen the effect that these two have had on the world with their bullshit. They gave idiots who should have but never will know better, the ammunition they wanted to justify gross stupidity. I don’t know if they did it with intent, but I’d bet all the money in my pocket that they did. They are enablers, they created and gave out the weapons so that people could be hurt. They didn’t use the weapons but they instructed the ones that did in their use.
Because they didn’t pull the trigger they are less culpable?
Joel
@liberal: Well, yeah, patients are expensive. Clinical trials should have funds (i.e. dedicated grants) dedicated to reproduction.
Anna in PDX
If R&R actually got fired, it would be a small helping of schadenfreude since god knows how influential their Excel-challenged data was to the people who are still leading us into austerity.
since they are not actually facing any measurably real consequences, they can go ahead and graph their butthurt in Excel but it will remain an imaginary number.
El Cid
@Ruckus: It’s gotten to the point where Krugman is basically concluding (this is about him, not whether the point has been made before) that ‘economics’ as a category of public sphere discourse is about justifying the desires of the uppermost classes.
That’s not something he believed before this began. This stuff is so obvious, so naked, that even a prestigious, award-winning mainstream economist published by the biggest establishmentarian newspaper on the planet came to that conclusion.
There’s a beautiful crudeness of the last few years which at least no longer pretends to be subtle, complicated, beyond the comprehension of the ordinary, it’s pretty much all down to FKUIGOTMINE.
El Cid
@Anna in PDX: Most of their more liberal or at least less-rightwing-orthodox colleagues will pity them and their personal frustrations in a sort of spasm of class-profession solidarity more than they will feel any anger at what was wrought upon so many using the justifications of these lazy, selfish, fraudulent elitist jerks.
El Cid
@Ruckus: Imagine it was some other topic.
Imagine it was your job to calculate the safe temperatures of flammability for some material.
Imagine you did it wrong, you did it quick, you made fundamental calculation and spreadsheet errors, and there’s no evidence you went through the sorts of self- and double-checking you would if you really, really wanted to be sure you were right about your calculations, given the urgency and deadliness of the matter.
And then you go to lots of places and give testimony about how everything of this substance is perfectly safe up until X degrees C, and then it turned out to be F, or whatever.
Mistakes happen, but you didn’t just make that calculation once — it’s not like you were given 5 seconds and then had to put down your work because it’s IQ bowl.
No one stopped you from doublechecking your work a day later, or a week later, or calling people in over the next few months and asking, ‘Hey, did I get this right?’
No, but you did accept all the honorifics and went to lots of places in which people who wanted to hear that this material was safe through X temperature heard you tell them what they wanted to hear.
And then of course it wasn’t, and people got burned, and it emerges that you didn’t do any of the things you know damn well you’re supposed to to make sure you got your figures right, not once, but never, no, it doesn’t matter too much that you didn’t do that cruel negligence intentionally.
That’s what’s going on here. It’s a callous, injurious negligence and so often people act like only snickering, willful, sneer-into-the-camera maliciousness is actually evil and all else kind of falls into a ‘oh well, humans are fallible’ category.
Jay in Oregon
You know who else cherry picked data in a rush to justify a foregone conclusion that caused suffering and death for millions?
Ruckus
@El Cid:
I believe we have arrived at what is known as “The same page”. And our reading comprehension is good.
Ruckus
@El Cid:
FKUIGOTMINE
Actually I believe it is FKUIGOTMINEANDIWANTITALL
Kathy Killeen
@EconWatcher:
UMass Economics department formed the basis for my hubby and I’s lifelong political outlook. We were there in the early 70’s and took courses with the most amazing, brilliant thinkers- Mike Best, Herb Gintis, Sam Bowles.
Blown away that that our beloved UMass was behind this takedown of Siegfried and Roy!
El Cid
@Kathy Killeen: Amazing that I, with no economics training, also knew they were full of shit by possessing the memory of what had gone on for the prior 20 years, when Western econo-shits had also imposed the same bullshit on 3rd world economies for decades, only to see the native populations finally realize it for the con game it was. And I required only the willingess to listen to those 3rd worlders tell what was happening!
Sondra
@NonyNony:
Bravo. Well said. Isn’t this what ideologues always do? They lecture, stomp their feet, demand to be heard and obeyed. Then when it all goes wrong they say “what…who me…it’s not my fault…boo hoo, why are you so mean to me?”.
DavidTC
No shit. I have no training whatsoever in economics, I’ve literally never taken a class in it in my entire life, and I figured out that housing prices couldn’t actually work the way they were explained as working (They always go up!) back in 2004.
The price of some random luxury, sure, that could behave like that. The price of stamps from the 1920s will probably always go up, I can buy that argument. I would even buy an argument that gold might always go up. It doesn’t, but I can see a world where it does. In fact, I actually think we’ve hit peak oil, and oil prices are never going to noticeable drop again. (Long term oil investments, however, are rather tricky.)
But, uh, not housing. That is literally impossible. We _require_ housing, and, hence, by definition, if housing prices go up, eventually inflation will happen.
And considering they kept _making_ more houses (Unlike stamps from the 1920s) and there’s logically no reason for the production to be more expensive (In fact, while construction is not like tech, it does get slightly cheaper as technology advances.) there is no actual reason for housing prices to go up _at all_ in general. In specific areas, sure, but not in general.
Well, that’s not entirely true…if the price of food or other necessities started dropping, then the price of housing would proportionally rise, so I guess housing prices would _sorta_ rise…except not in actual dollar amounts like we saw, so that wasn’t it.
And hence me, with _literally no knowledge of economics except social studies in middle school and some Wikipedia browsing_, figured out housing must be one of those ‘bubbles’ that people talk about and was the stupidest damn ‘investment’ anyone could possibly.
I wasn’t able to talk my brother out of buying a house in 2004, but luckily he sold it before the crash, and when the crash hit my attempts to point out the bubble because the stuff of legend in my family because apparently I’m smarter than the entire damn country…or at least the fuckwads who claim to be ‘economists’. (Although, in fairness, I had no idea of the clusterfuck that was happening in mortgages…I was just talking about housing prices.)