Indeed, I am far more concerned about poverty and access to opportunity than arbitrary measures like static inequality. And it is unfortunate when people were trying to pin debt and growth together so closely without a reason – as that is also arbitrary.

With both SL and RR I appreciate the idea of pulling together data and raising questions – as we often don’t have enough data to clearly “tell what is the true or main driver”. What I’m not too happy with it then being used directly for policy – as in turn we need to think about the mechanism of how the policy works to understand the impact on peoples lives!

The fact the “target” of policy is not the things we can measure is a point that is often missed, and one of the things that make matters confusing!

I enjoy reading your stuff (when I can understand it ;)) and am all for NZ bias as it’s where I live! For me, in this case, R&R seemed to go out “wanting” there to be a causation from the stock of debt to lower growth. And this is just the same as Pickett and co with the Spirit Level: they “want” to tell us that less inequality has proven to produce better outcomes etc. They do go quite far with that – I agree! Personally, what concerns me is the worst off in society. I don’t mind inequality per se, as long as there’s a high enough lower bound on it.

I don’t disagree that there were severe issues, I especially saw the groupings as arbitrary and the question as loosely framed – but within the scope of the initial paper it was just there. I would never, ever, ever, take policy conclusions from it. I haven’t posted much on it as it hasn’t been used for anything here.

It is also a bit harsh to call something bad research when it is trying to “beg a question” – they were describing the idea that the stock of debt has an impact on growth, in order to drive future research. Many economic “models” are of this begging the question type form – we cannot take policy conclusions from these types of papers, but it gives us a direction for research. People taking policy conclusions were being incredibly dodgy, and if R&R did do that (or didn’t correct the inference) then they are guilty as well. That’s cool.

If I had seen people mentioning the paper for justifications for things it is not inside New Zealand, I would have reviewed it. But time is quite scarce, so I generally have to do these things in response to news 🙂

I cannot write about everything sadly – and I have a strong bias towards writing things that are being used for policy in NZ!

I havent heard anything from you on R&R other than how they were misinterpreted! But the result was not replicable, reverse causation problems were not addressed, groupings were arbitrary, and no explanation of the weighting they used. This is BAD research! This is an academic paper and should be judged as such don’t you think? It doesn’t matter they’re from Harvard, or represent the dominant school of economics, or that they’ve done decent stuff in the past.

You are chatting about this guy here?

http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2013/04/17/the-excel-error-in-rogoff-reinhart/

When I read the initial paper they didn’t really seem to be saying anything as completely policy relevant – and as I say in the post it is non-causal so I didn’t see it as implying anything. I know it has been misused substantially in the US, which I’m very disappointed about, but none the people reading TVHE are in the US 🙂

This book is directly trying to say something is policy relevant and what to adjust, so it has to be judged on those lines.

Spam bot, are you joshing me

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