Niall Ferguson's Abysmal Defense of His Abysmal Newsweek Piece

      Evidently he doesn't know when to fold em. Rather than backing off such a putrid front page piece in Newsweek, he's doubling down with a spurious defense to a spurious piece attacking President Obama. He had previously claimed that Obama's ACA bill increased the deficit according to CBO.

    As this has been shown to be false now he's claiming to have never made such a claim. As Krugman pointed out in response to the original Newsweek article:

    " There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/niall-fergusons-embarrassing-response-to-paul-krugman-2012-8#ixzz24754CJMf

      This is Ferguson's attempt at a response:

       "Krugman counters in his Conscience of a Liberal blog by saying: “The ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit—because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.” But I very deliberately said “the insurance coverage provisions of the ACA,” not “the ACA.” There is a big difference."
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/niall-fergusons-embarrassing-response-to-paul-krugman-2012-8#ixzz2475bJTPN

       It's certainly an important difference but now it doesn't make any sense anymore. Why would you only consider the insurance coverage provisions but not the whole thing?

       "in his defense today, Ferguson argues that he was right because he was only referring to the insurance side of the ACA. But such a claim completely up-ends his argument that Obama did not hold up his end of the bargain. You cannot factor in the insurance costs while ignoring revenue anymore than you can argue that you lost money on a beer-run because you didn't include the fact that people paid you back. (Huge hat-tip to Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal, who lays this out in much clearer terms.)"

       http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/08/niall-fergusons-ridiculous-misleading-defense-132551.html

        Ferguson came into this with an agenda. He was complaining how he's not planning on being a "good loser" this year and his Newsweek piece was full of sorry Republican spin. This is someone who has taken to lauding Paul Ryan lately-which tells you all you need to know about Niall. His economic histories always did read more like drama than economics.

      But for him to write such a poor piece while resting on his reputation as a Harvard economist is a bridge too far. It may well be the last straw for Newsweek as well in publicising such shoddy work. This passage from James Fallows gives a good idea of the kind of not so rigorous analysis Niall treats us to:

      "Yes, I know, you could imagine many sentences that would follow that headline. But here is what I have in mind right now: A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade. It's by the irrepressible Niall Ferguson… its case rests on logic of this sort:

Certainly, the stock market is well up (by 74 percent) relative to the close on Inauguration Day 2009. But the total number of private-sector jobs is still 4.3 million below the January 2008 peak.

     "Hmmm, what might possibly be the flaw in this comparison? Apart from the fact that Obama did not take office until January 2009 and that private sector jobs have recovered better in his first three-plus years than they did under George W. Bush…."

    "I do wonder how a criticism of a president, based on a benchmark a year before he took office, and about 16 months before his main "stimulus" effort began taking effect, would be assessed in Harvard's history or economics departments.

Unemployment is America's worst economic problem, and Obama's. But this is not the way to demonstrate it. The Atlantic's Robert Wright has argued, to similar effect, that relative to European economies hit by the terrible employment shock of 2008-2009, the U.S. has recovered better, faster, than others have.

     http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/08/and-james-fallows-tears-niall-ferguson-to-shreds-and-gobbets-and-then-eats-the-gobbets.html#more

     Delong thinks that Ferguson has destroyed his reputation irreparably this time:

      "A reader who trusted Ferguson--and I hope no such readers will exist by the end of today..."

     http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/08/more-lies-from-niall-ferguson.html