I did post yesterday about the issue of R-R facing the Rortian moment of disapproval of their peer group-other establishment economists. Indeed, R-R give us an idea of what it's like to suffer this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/debt-growth-and-the-austerity-debate.html?hp&_r=1&
"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. As career academic economists (our only senior public service has been in the research department at the International Monetary Fund) we find these attacks a sad commentary on the politicization of social science research. But our feelings are not what’s important here.
Though they say their feelings don't matter they sound rather indignant. Nevertheless, Miles Kimball insists it's a necessary rite to keep economists honest:
"Ken Rogoff is an economist who has always been kind to me, and for whom I have deep respect. And I have no animus toward Carmen Reinhart. Nevertheless, I hope there has been a nightmarish quality to the last few days of what Quartz writer Matt Phillips called a “bone-crunching social media pile-on that Harvard economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart received in recent days after some other researchers questioned their influential findings that high government debt is a drag on economic growth.” I say this because I know from my own experience as a researcher how powerfully the hint of such an embarrassment motivates economists and other researchers to sweat the details to get things right. Some errors will always slip through the cracks, but a researcher ought to live in mortal fear of a contretemps like that Reinhart and Rogoff have found themselves in this week."
http://qz.com/76447/an-economists-mea-culpa-i-relied-on-rogoff-and-reinhart/
No question R-R have suffered a lot of knocks. On the other hand, they have had a number of apologists as well. Indeed, Kimball himself, after taking responsibility for his part in falling for R-R then insisted that they were nevertheless right 'Excel error or no.' That was a rather ingenious form of apologetics: the unapologetic apology.
This is more or less R-R's escuse too: what's a little Excel error and what's the big deal about the number 90%-we never said it has magic powers, some politicians used our work and said it did but how's that any skin off our noses?
Tyler Cowen had a slightly different tact: R-R failed to be properly nuanced.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/reinhart-rogoff-and-their-apologists.html
However, Ezra Klein has an rather novel form of R-R apologetics. Krugman, however, isn't buying:
"Ezra Klein tries to broker peace:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/debt-growth-and-the-austerity-debate.html?hp&_r=1&
"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. As career academic economists (our only senior public service has been in the research department at the International Monetary Fund) we find these attacks a sad commentary on the politicization of social science research. But our feelings are not what’s important here.
Though they say their feelings don't matter they sound rather indignant. Nevertheless, Miles Kimball insists it's a necessary rite to keep economists honest:
"Ken Rogoff is an economist who has always been kind to me, and for whom I have deep respect. And I have no animus toward Carmen Reinhart. Nevertheless, I hope there has been a nightmarish quality to the last few days of what Quartz writer Matt Phillips called a “bone-crunching social media pile-on that Harvard economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart received in recent days after some other researchers questioned their influential findings that high government debt is a drag on economic growth.” I say this because I know from my own experience as a researcher how powerfully the hint of such an embarrassment motivates economists and other researchers to sweat the details to get things right. Some errors will always slip through the cracks, but a researcher ought to live in mortal fear of a contretemps like that Reinhart and Rogoff have found themselves in this week."
http://qz.com/76447/an-economists-mea-culpa-i-relied-on-rogoff-and-reinhart/
No question R-R have suffered a lot of knocks. On the other hand, they have had a number of apologists as well. Indeed, Kimball himself, after taking responsibility for his part in falling for R-R then insisted that they were nevertheless right 'Excel error or no.' That was a rather ingenious form of apologetics: the unapologetic apology.
This is more or less R-R's escuse too: what's a little Excel error and what's the big deal about the number 90%-we never said it has magic powers, some politicians used our work and said it did but how's that any skin off our noses?
Tyler Cowen had a slightly different tact: R-R failed to be properly nuanced.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/reinhart-rogoff-and-their-apologists.html
However, Ezra Klein has an rather novel form of R-R apologetics. Krugman, however, isn't buying:
"Ezra Klein tries to broker peace:
The more modest differences between the various participants in the broader austerity debate are covering up a real area of consensus: We could, and should, do more now, and we could, and should, couple that with policies that reduce deficits in the medium and, more to the point, long term.The debate between most of the academic “austerians” and the “keynesians” is, in many ways, a fake debate: There’s no serious economic model in which $400 billion in stimulus spending — plus some principal reduction — over the next two years would destabilize the bond markets if it was coupled with $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next 12 years.Reinhart and Rogoff could have been doing much more to call out the inanity of this position, which has blocked both more short-term support for the economy and more long-term deficit reduction. That, for them, should be a lesson of this debacle: They got in bed with politicians whose policy agenda had little to do with their actual research, and so now they’re being blamed for that policy agenda.
"OK, what I’d say is that it’s not the debate that’s fake; it’s the consensus, because it has nothing to do with actual political possibilities."
"Look, we are not going to have a deal that trades short-term stimulus for medium-term deficit reduction. Na ga ha pen. And for a good reason, too: our political parties have fundamentally different visions of what kind of country we should have, and neither is feeling politically weak enough to agree to lock in any of the other side’s vision.This means that any decisions about short-term spending have to be taken along with an asterisk: “*to be offset by longer-run adjustments to be determined later.”
"That’s the real world in which macroeconomic analysis plays a role. The question is whether you support austerity now or not — saying that you would oppose austerity if politicians simultaneously did something they aren’t going to do is, de facto, support for austerity. The reality is that as an economist, you’re either trying to calm deficit hysteria or you’re helping to ratchet it up."
"And R-R were clearly helping to ratchet up the fear. If that’s not what they meant to do, well, it would have been easy for them to say, clearly, that despite the negative correlation between debt and growth they were opposed to spending cuts right now. They never did that."
"This is, I’d say, part of a broader point: the responsibility of public intellectuals in general goes beyond talking about the ideal. I don’t mean that you have to draft legislation that can pass Congress, or whatever; I do mean that you need to make it clear where you stand on the actual decisions being made, as opposed to merely stating what we should do but won’t. And this is especially true when you know full well that many people are invoking your work to push for policies that look nothing like your ideal."
"So yes, Ezra is right that my worldview is a lot closer to Reinhart and Rogoff’s than it is to Paul Ryan’s or Olli Rehn’s. So? R-R effectively lent aid and comfort to the Ryans and the Rehns, and knew that they were doing so. They need to own up to that fact."
When you look at the role R-R have played the last few years, you see Krugman is dead right. They sure weren't singing Krugman's praises when they were hanging out with Tom Coburn. Kimball here discusses their influence on the debate in Washington:
"For an indicator, read the following passage from a book on US debt by Republican Senator Tom Coburn. This is a scene that takes place on April 5, 2011, when forty senators met the authors of the study, Harvard economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart, for a briefing. It was just months before disagreements over America’s fiscal path lead to a confrontation over the country’s borrowing limit and a near-default.
Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia and always a gentleman, stood up to ask his question: “Do we need to act this year? Is it better to act quickly?”“Absolutely,” Rogoff said. “Not acting moves the risk closer,” he explained, because every year of not acting adds another year of debt accumulation. “You have very few levers at this point,” he warned us.…Senator Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Comittee, said our current deficits were severe because we had very low revenues due to a slow economy combined with very high spending. He then offered his own stern warning to the assembled senators. Turning around in his chair in the middle of the room, he explained to his colleagues that when our high debt burden causes our economy to slow by 1 point of GDP, as Reinhart and Rogoff estimate, that doesn’t slow our economy by 1 percent by 25 to 33 percentwhen we are growing at only 3 to 4 GDP points a year.Reinhart echoed Conrad’s point and explained that countries rarely pass the 90 percent debt-to-GDP tipping point precisely because it is dangerous to let that much debt accumulate. She said, “If it is not risky to hit the 90 percent threshold, we would expect a higher incidence.”Senator and former governor Mike Johanns, a Republican from Nebraska, asked, “Is there a point at which the debt market rebels?”“I don’t want to be fire and brimstone,” Rogoff said. “No one knows when this will happen. ” Yet, he added, “It takes more than two years to turn the ship around … Once you’ve waited too long, it’s hard to take radical steps.”
"It’s hard to get bipartisan agreement on anything in the Senate, but you can see influential legislators from both parties were listening closely to the two economists as they engaged in key debates over the economy. Even the notoriously obstreperous Coburn noted that ”there was remarkable agreement about the severity of the problem.”
I say this exchange in particular cinches it. Klein says that R-R believe in short term stimulus and long term deficit reduction. This totally belies that:
Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia and always a gentleman, stood up to ask his question: “Do we need to act this year? Is it better to act quickly?”
“Absolutely,” Rogoff said. “Not acting moves the risk closer,” he explained, because every year of not acting adds another year of debt accumulation. “You have very few levers at this point,” he warned us.
There's no way R-R have any right to complain that politicians took them out of context or missed their nuance. Not after that exchange. Yet in their new piece they claim:
"We agree that growth is an elusive goal at times of high debt. We know that cutting spending and raising taxes is tough in a slow-growth economy with persistent unemployment. Austerity seldom works without structural reforms — for example, changes in taxes, regulations and labor market policies — and if poorly designed, can disproportionately hit the poor and middle class. Our consistent advice has been to avoid withdrawing fiscal stimulus too quickly, a position identical to that of most mainstream economists."
That sure doesn't come through that they feel that way in the dialouge with Isakson.
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