Oops
Most of the people around here are familiar with the Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™ – the perverse idea that leads one to conclude that as tax rates approach zero, tax revenues approach infinity. That is holy writ for the Supply-Siders.
The Austerians in many areas have an equivalent in the Reinhart-Rogoff research paper on the effect of public debt. At the Next New Deal Mike Konczal writes that Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.
Reinhart and Rogoff didn’t release their data set with their paper, so it has taken a while to replicate what they did to show negative economic growth when governments have a debt at 90% or above of the GDP.
Essentially what the researchers found is that the only way of reproducing the results of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper is with a range error in an Excel spreadsheet formula. Here’s the thing that gets me – it isn’t a large range, and you should have been able to estimate the answer if you had any decent math skills. Given that the answer that Reinhart-Rogoff got on their spreadsheet was near zero, it should have been obvious that something was wrong, but they published anyway.
People talk about universities as ‘ivory towers.’ If you have ever been a faculty member, especially at a research university, you know they are made of a collection of thick defensive keeps to protect the current ‘lord’. and frequent attacks on the keeps of other faculty members to wrest away their resources. The only thing that will unite a group in the same field is an attack on another ‘kingdom’ for research grants.
Reinhart and Rogoff should have known better, but there will be punishments meted out. As a group, academics do not forgive or forget, and they publish to ensure that no one else does.
7 comments
Nonsense. They will gain a well-paid sinecure at the Hoover Institute, and while they may never publish again, they will most certainly be regular guests on Faux News and other media of that ilk.
Remember, reality has a liberal bias, so the only way that conservatives can ever martial evidence for their views is by manufacturing it — by creating an artificial reality that is, well, made up. Reinhart and Rogoff will fit into that ecosphere like two peas in a pod.
– Badtux the Cynical Penguin
What he said. 🙂 😀
They should definitely stay away from Europe, and might consider moving to a cabin in Idaho.
The range error was the most obvious problem, but the entire things is riddled with errors and obvious ‘cherry picking’ to produce the results they wanted.
Yes. the wingers will give them a welfare job, but they should be charged with something, “Fraud that caused mass suffering?” They should get life for George Osbourne’s rise to power.
The penalty for academic fraud is, alas, limited to loss of tenure and loss of academic credibility. People who took actions based upon a single academic study simply because said academic study said what they wished to believe are the people to blame here (rule: no single unreplicated academic study has any validity because a sample size of 1 has a 100% confidence interval, i.e., reality could be anywhere from 0% to 100% of what they said). The reality is that the right wingers would have manufactured evidence without the help of Reinhart and Rogoff if Reinhart and Rogoff had not existed, because they needed something to help them further their goal of transferring wealth from the productive classes (those that actually produce wealth in the form of goods and services) to the grifter class (those who “own” wealth but do not themselves personally produce any goods and services). Reinhart and Rogoff were convenient, that’s all.
Reinhart and Rogoff may not have actually planned to become austerity shills, but their data and methods are so messed up, that no one could assume that they were doing actual research. There are too many things that point to bespoke research with a predetermined conclusion. They had the answer, but they needed to create the question so it would fit that answer.
I know too many good people who can’t land the university teaching position they want because of funding cuts to give anyone who prostitutes their position for politics. If they want to hack research there are plenty of ‘think tanks’ that will hire them to skew their data.
Since time out of mind, students of any sort of engineering have been taught to make estimates, mentally if possible or with a “slide rule” (whatever) if not, to determine the plausibility of numeric results. Why theoreticians do not also do this routinely is beyond me. Are you off by an order of magnitude? multiple orders of magnitude? If you’re an engineer, you want to know, before the bridge falls or the circuit burns up. They actually taught engineers to do this when I was in college.
Maybe R&R need a refresher in making estimates. Or maybe they’re committing fraud by selectively omitting data. Both these things happen more often than we care to think.
Steve, it was a dozen two digit numbers that were going to be averaged. If the spreadsheet is saying -0.1 the sum has to be negative. Just looking quickly it was obvious it wasn’t going to be. This is elementary school arithmetic, not calculus.
Come on, these guys don’t seem to able to make change and they are making economic pronouncements? WTF, really?!