We all have ideological baggage – the best we can do is try to make sure everyone can see it, rather than trying to hide it behind something. And by everyone, this includeds the person with the baggage 😉

What can I say, it is really hard to measure how much we produce right 😉

And if we thought what Argo did to us Kiwis was bad, look at what R-R did to our bucolic land:

“This is a very odd response from two authors who equated one year of New Zealand to 19 years of the far larger UK economy. Worse still when you add the fact that by excluding several years when New Zealand had a debt/GDP ratio over 90%, they got an “average” (actually only one year) growth rate of -7.6%, when the correct average, with all relevant years over 90% included, was 2.58%, a 10.18 point swing!”

Extract from http://middleclasspoliticaleconomist.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/breaking-reinhartrogoff-shot-full-of.html

Sweetly cynical, and perhaps especially applicable to the British government which is now being begged by the IMF, of all people! to reverse course as the evidence mounts in the economic stats of the foolishness of austerity in a time of depressed demand.

Of course this is not to imply that the IMF would advocate fiscal stimulus. It seems to me that in the IMF world fiscal policy should be contractionary by default, with only a slight bias towards neutrality if they sense the great unwashed are becoming particularly restless.

But that view may just be my own ideological baggage…sigh.

I dislike the same person using the same empirical result inconsistently (or at least unwilling to illustrate the assumptions that would make the results consistent – so that they can be open to scrutiny) OR too firmly.

The first is a more objective irritation, while the second is indeed tinged by my own subjective firm on what “too firm” is. However, I have to be honest 😉