{"id":13708,"date":"2013-05-05T17:20:34","date_gmt":"2013-05-05T21:20:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=13708"},"modified":"2013-05-05T21:27:38","modified_gmt":"2013-05-06T01:27:38","slug":"whats-the-matter-with-harvard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2013\/05\/05\/whats-the-matter-with-harvard\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s The Matter With Harvard?"},"content":{"rendered":"

and The Boston Globe<\/em>, for that matter.\u00a0 The Boston Globe has an editorial today in which they praise Harvard Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff for owning up to a mistake in their influential research paper and book.<\/p>\n

Errors happen in statistical research<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

is how the editorial phrased it. When they had provided their data to a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,<\/p>\n

…he found a Microsoft Excel error that distorted their results.\u00a0 Corrected computations showed by some accounts, that carrying very high debts – of over 90 percent of gross domestic product – wasn’t quite as ruinous as the two Harvard economists had computed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Look at the video in my previous post, Study Debunking Austerity Research Sparks Wide Reaction<\/strong><\/a>, to see how gross an understatement “wasn’t quite as ruinous” is.<\/p>\n

Now we turn to the Brainiac<\/em> column at the front of the very same editorial section of the newspaper.<\/p>\n

But when Thomas Herndon, a UMass economics student, endeavored to replicate Reinhart and Rogoff’s results for a class assignment, he quickly found that he couldn’t. When he dug a little deeper he realized why: The paper had significant errors, including data omissions, questionable decisions about how to weight data, and a coding typo in the Excel spreadsheet they used to calculate the results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This seems a little more serious than the previously quoted editorial statement\u00a0 “Errors happen in statistical research.”<\/p>\n

Then of course there is the Brainiac<\/em> comment<\/p>\n

The whole dust-up has also highlighted a basic issue present all along in Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper: It doesn’t address causality. That is, it doesn’t show whether high debt slows economic growth, or whether slow economic growth leads to high debt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lest you think that the Brainiac<\/em> column is taking a purely factual stance they include the comment,<\/p>\n

In the 1970s, he explained [Dylan Matthews], it [the UMass economics department], remade around a coterie of Marxist radicals and post-Keynesians.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the knocks against the UMass researchers is that\u00a0 they concentrate , among other things, on<\/p>\n

using empirical analysis to question tenets of economic thinking…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To think that anyone would look at how things work in reality instead of basing their thinking on their personal gut reactions must be beyond the pale of anything that could be considered by the Globe editors or the Harvard professors.<\/p>\n

In the Metro section of this same newspaper, there is an article, “Professor apologizes for remarks on economist.”\u00a0 The start of the article explains,<\/p>\n

Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor, sought to defuse a controversy Saturday when he apologized for telling an investors’ conference that the policies of influential economist John Maynard Keynes were short-sighted because Keynes was gay and had no children.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article goes on to explain that Ferguson<\/p>\n

was an adviser for US Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid and has been highly critical of President Obama…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article quotes a conference attendee:<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Gundlach, founder of the investment firm Doubleline Capital, said he heard the exchange and “wasn’t offended by it in any way.”\u00a0 It made him think back to how his views changed when his first child was born.<\/p>\n

“I thought it was informative and sort of insightful”, he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is one thing to get an idea about something from your personal experience.\u00a0 It is quite another to assume it is a universal truth before making a reality check.<\/p>\n

And then of course there is the gross injustice of implying that John Maynard Keynes ever espoused deficit spending under all circumstances.\u00a0 His theory distinctly points out when you should do it and when you should not.\u00a0 It was the irresponsible Republicans and their academic toadies that said deficits don’t matter during the phase of the economic cycle in which Keynes said the government should be running surpluses, but the Republicans ran up huge deficits.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

and The Boston Globe, for that matter.\u00a0 The Boston Globe has an editorial today in which they praise Harvard Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff for owning up to a mistake in their influential research paper and book. Errors happen in statistical research is how the editorial phrased it. When they had provided their data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-13708","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13708"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13720,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13708\/revisions\/13720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}