Here’s the best public whine you will see from an academic in a long time, courtesy of Carmen Reinhart at Harvard:
We admire your past scholarly work, which influences us to this day. So it has been with deep disappointment that we have experienced your spectacularly uncivil behavior the past few weeks. You have attacked us in very personal terms, virtually non-stop, in your New York Times column and blog posts. Now you have doubled down in the New York Review of Books, adding the accusation we didn’t share our data. Your characterization of our work and of our policy impact is selective and shallow. It is deeply misleading about where we stand on the issues. And we would respectfully submit, your logic and evidence on the policy substance is not nearly as compelling as you imply.
You particularly take aim at our 2010 paper on the long-term secular association between high debt and slow growth. That you disagree with our interpretation of the results is your prerogative. Your thoroughly ignoring the subsequent literature, however, including the International Monetary Fund’s work as well as our own deeper and more complete 2012 paper with Vincent Reinhart, is troubling. Perhaps, acknowledging the updated literature-not to mention decades of theoretical, empirical, and historical contributions on drawbacks to high debt-would inconveniently undermine your attempt to make us a scapegoat for austerity. You write “Indeed, Reinhart-Rogoff may have had more immediate influence on public debate than any previous paper in the history of economics.”
Your research was widely cited to invalidate Kthug and other’s arguments, and then some kid with a better knowledge of excel than you two halfwits debunked all your bullshit, so now we get whiny letters to the open public. Maybe you should stop borrowing McMegan’s calculator. Just a thought. Or at least blame it on gastritis…
Christ, what a fucking joke. Do people no longer have any shame?