Sumner and James Hamilton Speak on R-R's Behalf

     I would say that R-R have two more members of their peer group speak on their behalf though Sumner is very careful how he presents this defense. For more on the importance of Richard Rorty's peer group for economists please see here.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-rogoff-reinhart-meltdown-richard.html

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-rogoff-reinhart-meltdown-richard.html

    Still he does say that their mistake is pretty trivial.

    "’I've stayed out of the R&R kerfuffle.  This is partly because I haven’t read their paper, partly because James Hamilton points out that the mistakes were fairly minor, and partly because Matt Yglesias points out that the real issue is causality, which R&R’s study doesn’t resolve."

    http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=20912#comment-245054

    Ok, he doesn't so much say the mistakes were trivial as appeal to Hamilton saying that they were. He is right about causality not being solved-he throws it in here to make it clear it's not a defense of R-R-or at least not totally. 

   He claims that R-R were right and Krugman was wrong about EU debt spiking. Of course, he's still ticked at Krugman for his piece criticizing Market Monetarism. 

   http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/04/krugman-calls-out-sumner-hornets-nest.html

   As to the claim, here it is:

   "Hamilton also noted that R&R have been far more accurate in their predictions of the eurozone debt crisis than Krugman, who pooh-poohed the notion of a widespread sovereign debt crisis in 2009.  I notice that Krugman has now begun using phrases like “garbage-in, garbage out” to describe the quality of Rogoff and Reinhart’s empirical research.  (OK, he doesn’t mention their name, but does anyone doubt which paper he is referring to."

    If R-R were right it wasn't for the right reasons. Krugman has long made the point that there's a difference with the periphery euro countries-Greece, Cyprus, Spain-in that they don't make their own monetary policy. Krugman also noted just yesterday that Italy's interest rates have now come down thanks to Draghii's credible promise to 'do whatever it takes" to save the euro.

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/the-italian-miracle/

     As to Hamilton, he's either being dishonest or is misinformed:

     "With all the heated discussions of the last two weeks, it is important to keep perspective on which issues are in dispute and which are not. Let me state plainly something on which I think we ought to be agreed: Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff's 2009 book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, is a valuable work of scholarship that continues to deserve study and praise from any thinking person. Here I review some of my reasons for saying that."

     http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2013/04/the_contributio.html

       Fine but where did Krugman-or any other R-R critic suggest otherwise?

       "To briefly summarize the facts that you'll find developed more fully there, some researchers at the University of Massachusetts have challenged one tiny detail of one follow-up study by Reinhart and Rogoff having to do with an issue that I have yet to even mention so far in today's discussion. That dispute concerns a measure of the correlation between sovereign debt levels and GDP growth. I say it is a tiny detail, because the dispute is completely restricted to just one of six different summaries of three different data sets in that one particular paper. The Massachusetts researchers correctly noted that there is an error in the spreadsheet which, if corrected, would have changed the number Reinhart and Rogoff should have reported for that one statistic by a few tenths of a percent. Bigger changes in that one statistic could be obtained if one adds some additional data and makes what I regard as a questionable change in methodology, but even with all the changes they want to make, the results preferred by the University of Massachusetts researchers are in fact very similar to the other 5 dataset summaries that will be found in Reinhart and Rogoff's original paper, as well as a subsequent analysis of expanded data that Reinhart and Rogoff published in 2012 (which again the Massachusetts scholars did not mention or discuss)."

     "So how does any of that cause us to discount or dismiss the contributions of This Time Is Different? You tell me."

     The trouble is that he's basically doing Kabuki Theater here. He's pushing an open door as no one disagrees that R-R's book was of high quality, certainly not Krugman. It's the paper that is under fire and rightly so. 

     As no one is saying otherwise Hamilton's tact here doesn't make much sense.