my conclusion after one minute of glancing: this is pseudoscientific babble
and I say that given the low, low bar I have granted for mainstream macroeconomics as a science above, too
Yea, I haven't read enough of it, not even the whole PDF so take with salt, I just saw it had decent citation stats when I googled the gist of what I was talking about. I usually try t get my stuff from things I pay for, so citing them on forums can be tough. Unless I wanna dredge the futurist swamp...
I am confident that Krugman has published some stuff on it too, though. So, pick your poison. His is more about policy and China that I can remember though. I think I borrowed some of my logic from a piece he did on the differences in the labor markets in Chengdu(?).
In the R&R paper discussion, Krugman has a good post about some analysis from Arindrajit Dube of the dataset taking into account serial correlation and time based effects. Even if that doesn't show causality, it is a hell of a lot more rigorous use of the data than Reinhart-Rogoff did with their paper.
Krugman breaks it down pretty well, but basically you would expect there to be influence and correlation between debt and growth numbers over different time periods, and the nature of that influence would depend upon which direction the causality is going (and it can go both ways to some extent). If high past debt was directly causing a slowing of growth like implied by R&R, you'd expect the current debt level at a particular time to be strongly predictive of the growth level or change in growth in the near future, like over the next few years. There would also be some correlation between debt level and level of growth in the near past due to the countries building up the debt over time, but the correlation between future growth and debt levels should be stronger. (Edit: negative correlations, to be clear)
On the flip side, if the causality effects are more important in the other direction, so you are having a ramp up in debt due a declining or downturning economy, and a ramp down of debt due to a strong economy, the strength of the two time based correlations between debt level and growth should be flipped. So the debt level now would be more strongly (negatively) correlated with the past few years of growth than the next few years of growth. The reason for something like this possibly being the case is somewhat obvious if you think about it, a weaker economy often means a decrease in tax revenue which would put an upward pressure on deficits, and a lot of the legacy of Keynes means that governments will often keep up spending and stimulus despite the increase in debt to try to help the economy.
Anyways, here are the resultant graphs:
This is more consistent with the second story, that the causality, if present, flows more strongly from growth to debt level than the other way around.
You'd think big shot economists like Reinhart and Rogoff would think to look into time effects somewhat if they were going to make a big deal about a paper based on this data.
quite. It is for this reason that people work shorter hours than they did at the height of the industrial revolution, but what work they can get during the shorter hours is generally much high-paying, thanks to the new machinery.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
quite. It is for this reason that people work shorter hours than they did at the height of the industrial revolution, but what work they can get during the shorter hours is generally much high-paying, thanks to the new machinery.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
perpetual welfare for a slowly expanding group is the inevitable future. Once upon a time states did not consider the disabled or old to be entitled to permanent state largesse; today they do. The umbrella is going to creep upwards in size inexorably. Indeed your country's retirees are one of the most powerful interest groups as far as welfare goes, trumping any other welfare cause.
the mystery of stagnant average American real wages is heavily explained by a shift in labour wages from money wages to compensation via healthcare and fund contributions etc., since American law places heavy tax favours on these. once these are taken into account, American real labour compensation is no longer stagnant (although it still lags productivity).
quite. It is for this reason that people work shorter hours than they did at the height of the industrial revolution, but what work they can get during the shorter hours is generally much high-paying, thanks to the new machinery.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
perpetual welfare for a slowly expanding group is the inevitable future. Once upon a time states did not consider the disabled or old to be entitled to permanent state largesse; today they do. The umbrella is going to creep upwards in size inexorably. Indeed your country's retirees are one of the most powerful interest groups as far as welfare goes, trumping any other welfare cause.
the mystery of stagnant average American real wages is heavily explained by a shift in labour wages from money wages to compensation via healthcare and fund contributions etc., since American law places heavy tax favours on these. once these are taken into account, American real labour compensation is no longer stagnant (although it still lags productivity).
I thought a large cause of amaerican real wages remaining stagnant was also due to greater portions of revenue being devoted to shareholder dividends as opposed to payroll?
quite. It is for this reason that people work shorter hours than they did at the height of the industrial revolution, but what work they can get during the shorter hours is generally much high-paying, thanks to the new machinery.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
perpetual welfare for a slowly expanding group is the inevitable future. Once upon a time states did not consider the disabled or old to be entitled to permanent state largesse; today they do. The umbrella is going to creep upwards in size inexorably. Indeed your country's retirees are one of the most powerful interest groups as far as welfare goes, trumping any other welfare cause.
the mystery of stagnant average American real wages is heavily explained by a shift in labour wages from money wages to compensation via healthcare and fund contributions etc., since American law places heavy tax favours on these. once these are taken into account, American real labour compensation is no longer stagnant (although it still lags productivity).
I thought a large cause of amaerican real wages remaining stagnant was also due to greater portions of revenue being devoted to shareholder dividends as opposed to payroll?
By identity if real compensation is not increasing as fast as productivity then either shareholders or management must be capturing the difference.
I am not sure if its dividends that are seeing it (IIRC there haven't been large changes in RoE in the market) and feel like management has probably captured it instead.
quite. It is for this reason that people work shorter hours than they did at the height of the industrial revolution, but what work they can get during the shorter hours is generally much high-paying, thanks to the new machinery.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
perpetual welfare for a slowly expanding group is the inevitable future. Once upon a time states did not consider the disabled or old to be entitled to permanent state largesse; today they do. The umbrella is going to creep upwards in size inexorably. Indeed your country's retirees are one of the most powerful interest groups as far as welfare goes, trumping any other welfare cause.
the mystery of stagnant average American real wages is heavily explained by a shift in labour wages from money wages to compensation via healthcare and fund contributions etc., since American law places heavy tax favours on these. once these are taken into account, American real labour compensation is no longer stagnant (although it still lags productivity).
I thought I would compare that to canada, since stagnant average real wages is a thing here too, and found this paper that considers causes of the gap between real wage growth and labour productivity growth; the paper also looks at some stats for other OECD countries and seems to suggest this is a common problem, but doesn't go in to detail for anyone but canada. The narrow definition of compensation explains 20% of the gap, according to this paper; the rest is due to other factors: growing earnings inequality, decreasing terms of trade, and fall in labour share of overall gdp. All of which seem kind of bad for labour.
quite. It is for this reason that people work shorter hours than they did at the height of the industrial revolution, but what work they can get during the shorter hours is generally much high-paying, thanks to the new machinery.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
perpetual welfare for a slowly expanding group is the inevitable future. Once upon a time states did not consider the disabled or old to be entitled to permanent state largesse; today they do. The umbrella is going to creep upwards in size inexorably. Indeed your country's retirees are one of the most powerful interest groups as far as welfare goes, trumping any other welfare cause.
the mystery of stagnant average American real wages is heavily explained by a shift in labour wages from money wages to compensation via healthcare and fund contributions etc., since American law places heavy tax favours on these. once these are taken into account, American real labour compensation is no longer stagnant (although it still lags productivity).
I thought I would compare that to canada, since stagnant average real wages is a thing here too, and found this paper that considers causes of the gap between real wage growth and labour productivity growth; the paper also looks at some stats for other OECD countries and seems to suggest this is a common problem, but doesn't go in to detail for anyone but canada. The narrow definition of compensation explains 20% of the gap, according to this paper; the rest is due to other factors: growing earnings inequality, decreasing terms of trade, and fall in labour share of overall gdp. All of which seem kind of bad for labour.
i.e., the apparent stagnation in canadian average real wages actually stems from a period that ended in 1997. for roughly 15 years since, canadian real wages have indeed tracked canadian labour productivity.
this is the long-run terms of trade:
where the fall that ended in the 1990s or so becomes obvious
Sorry for my n00bishness, but what's "Labour terms of trade"?
it's not a commonly-encountered concept, basically it applies the idea of terms of trade between countries - how much stuff you can buy from other countries, for a given unit of the amount of stuff you give up - to a "labour" and a "non-labour" sector within a single country
there are varying definitions; the paper mouserecoil linked defines it as the ratio between the price of stuff that workers consume and the price of stuff generally, whereas the WCI link defines it as the ratio between the price of stuff that workers consume and the price of stuff bought in order to produce stuff that workers consume (i.e., capital goods - factory equipment, etc.).
Your work caused a lot of pain and suffering. Now that it's come out that your work wouldn't pass even a basic level of scrutiny, no wonder people are pissed. Accept that you fucked up royally, and show some fucking contrition for the damage you did.
PS. I love the fact that it was the hippies that nailed your asses.
Seems a bit of a reach to blame R+R for all the austerity programs, most of which were in place before their 2010 paper.
Their paper was used as justification and defense of those programs. They spoke before legislative bodies citing their work as justification for austerity.
They do deserve the blame and scorn they're getting.
Here's a piece detailing how influential their work was. Now that their cherry picking and poor methodology has been outed, they're trying to play innocent. Doesn't work that way.
Seems a bit of a reach to blame R+R for all the austerity programs, most of which were in place before their 2010 paper.
Their paper was used as justification and defense of those programs. They spoke before legislative bodies citing their work as justification for austerity.
They do deserve the blame and scorn they're getting.
Well. Probably not the hate mail.
I'm of two minds on this one. Mostly on your side of this, though I think that it's not generally a scientist's fault if they produce results that are then used to justify X or Y. But as a scientist, the proper response to a major error like this is not to, ever, double down on the error. You issue a short statement, you take some time to review and redo your work, and reconsider your conclusions, after some really really strong reflection. The fact that their research, credentials, and integrity are under attack is entirely appropriate - it's how science is supposed to work. This sort of thing is exactly what's supposed to haunt my nightmares; it's our equivalent of showing up at school and finding out you're late for an exam you forgot about, naked. It may be a little blown out of proportion for these guys, but that's a consequence of the publicity and importance their work held in the public domain: the higher the climb, the longer the fall. You can't accept the praise that's lavished upon you and reject the criticism when it's similarly heaped. That's cognitive dissonance of the highest order.
And then the other half of it is... I guess it really is best described as whinging. Like they've only realised very recently that their work has been heavily politicized. Where were they when conservative politicians started citing their work as asserting that "90 percent was a magic threshold that transforms outcomes"? It's only now that they're being attacked that they realise social science research is politicized? This just reads like a highly intelligent, "no, it's not true, why are you people being so mean to me?" teenaged reflex response.
If you want to be even more irritated, consider the fact that R/R's careers will probably come out of this just fine. They were wrong in the right way.
They'll probably lay low for like a year, then resume giving intellectual cover for elite consensus as before.
Seems a bit of a reach to blame R+R for all the austerity programs, most of which were in place before their 2010 paper.
Their paper was used as justification and defense of those programs. They spoke before legislative bodies citing their work as justification for austerity.
They do deserve the blame and scorn they're getting.
Well. Probably not the hate mail.
I'm of two minds on this one. Mostly on your side of this, though I think that it's not generally a scientist's fault if they produce results that are then used to justify X or Y. But as a scientist, the proper response to a major error like this is not to, ever, double down on the error. You issue a short statement, you take some time to review and redo your work, and reconsider your conclusions, after some really really strong reflection. The fact that their research, credentials, and integrity are under attack is entirely appropriate - it's how science is supposed to work. This sort of thing is exactly what's supposed to haunt my nightmares; it's our equivalent of showing up at school and finding out you're late for an exam you forgot about, naked. It may be a little blown out of proportion for these guys, but that's a consequence of the publicity and importance their work held in the public domain: the higher the climb, the longer the fall. You can't accept the praise that's lavished upon you and reject the criticism when it's similarly heaped. That's cognitive dissonance of the highest order.
And then the other half of it is... I guess it really is best described as whinging. Like they've only realised very recently that their work has been heavily politicized. Where were they when conservative politicians started citing their work as asserting that "90 percent was a magic threshold that transforms outcomes"? It's only now that they're being attacked that they realise social science research is politicized? This just reads like a highly intelligent, "no, it's not true, why are you people being so mean to me?" teenaged reflex response.
They were wrong. Massively, catastrophically wrong. They didn't 'fake' the results at least, but an error in their methodology means that their work is utter garbage. That doesn't mean that they were 'almost right'. It means that they were wrong. They should apologize, say that they are glad the peer review process is hard at work, and say that they confirm the finding of the error.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
edited April 2013
From the layperson's perspective, the real issue with R&R is not that they supported their beliefs, or even that they used their own research to add scientific heft to their positions.
It's that they believe that they can do so while simultaneously hiding behind the shield of scholarship. There is a rather large gap between being asked to testify to your own knowledge before a political body and actively lobbying for your own particular agenda. They clearly moved to the latter camp (along with notables such as Paul Krugman).
Once you take this step, you are no longer allowed to claim the cause of intellectual integrity to protect yourself, because you are no longer participating in the world of academic scholarship - you are now participating in the world of politics. Do not play with fire unless you are prepared to get burned. Politicians will find any excuse to pursue their agenda, so don't confuse their use of your ideas to support their position as support of your entire intellectual perspective. I think R&R are quickly learning the lesson that in politics, you don't have to be the fastest - you just have to be faster than the one who gets caught first.
They clearly have a body of strong academic work while also having a body of strong political work. Those two things are entirely separate, and yet they are now using the former to attempt to prevent any criticism of the latter. To be perfectly honest, as a public citizen, I could care less what their research says. That stuff is for the economists to sort out within their own discipline. I do care, however, about what statements they made to politicians when those people asked them what they should do. That is the problem here, regardless of what their papers or research or PPT presentations say.
The academic scrutiny of their work is rather robust and speaks for itself, and largely seems to have taken consensus in that sphere. The political catharsis, however, is not as forthcoming, and their repeated public non-apologies and dissertations containing caveats and straw men are not at all convincing.
Whatever message they espoused to politicians, that message should be front-and-center with none of the hemming and hawing that is particular virulent in "policy" economists today, not whatever they can backtrack and straw man from hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of academic and public writing.
It should also be said that economics is not a field of empirical academic study in the same way that, say, physics is a field of empirical study. Politics is fundamentally a component of economics, and is/ought is far more blurry. It's closer to studying something like chess theory.
When you start publishing 'academic papers' and pretending that such a paper deserves the same prestige or perception as a paper published in Nature or Cell, you're being deceptive.
Where were they when conservative politicians started citing their work as asserting that "90 percent was a magic threshold that transforms outcomes"? It's only now that they're being attacked that they realise social science research is politicized? This just reads like a highly intelligent, "no, it's not true, why are you people being so mean to me?" teenaged reflex response.
To answer the question of "where were they" the answer is writing editorials in the New York Times explaining how their results mean we should move to austerity and testifying before those same congressman politicizing their work that "we need to act quickly" in order to achieve austerity before it is too late.
Oh the poor poor economists who have had their work politicized! Whomever will bemoan their suffering, brought upon them by the hands of those whom they have not wronged? Their only crime being too proper in explaining their results and all its caveats with those uninterested policy makers.
It should also be said that economics is not a field of empirical academic study in the same way that, say, physics is a field of empirical study. Politics is fundamentally a component of economics, and is/ought is far more blurry. It's closer to studying something like chess theory.
When you start publishing 'academic papers' and pretending that such a paper deserves the same prestige or perception as a paper published in Nature or Cell, you're being deceptive.
We have had this discussion before and there is a record of one such iteration in a thread devoted to the entire subject. Please do not use this thread as a means to push your incorrect notions of what science is and how any particular field is more or less sciency. The idea that Nature is any more science than Econometrica is wrong
Where were they when conservative politicians started citing their work as asserting that "90 percent was a magic threshold that transforms outcomes"? It's only now that they're being attacked that they realise social science research is politicized? This just reads like a highly intelligent, "no, it's not true, why are you people being so mean to me?" teenaged reflex response.
To answer the question of "where were they" the answer is writing editorials in the New York Times explaining how their results mean we should move to austerity and testifying before those same congressman politicizing their work that "we need to act quickly" in order to achieve austerity before it is too late.
Oh the poor poor economists who have had their work politicized! Whomever will bemoan their suffering, brought upon them by the hands of those whom they have not wronged? Their only crime being too proper in explaining their results and all its caveats with those uninterested policy makers.
Basically. I'm vaguely disgusted with me for owning their book.
Giving their response a little more thought, when you really parse it, they basically blame everybody but themselves. They blame their "accusers" at Amherst, they blame the media, they blame conservative politicians, they blame the (liberal) media, the blogosophere, the public realm, ... The mea culpa part of their response is literally half a sentence, and it's even phrased in such a way so as not to be about them: "They correctly identified a spreadsheet coding error...". The inclusion of "spreadsheet coding" even seems to suggest an attempt to minimize the error - it was just a spreadsheet coding error, not a deeper methodological error! (Also, 1% less growth?! Omfg, call the National Guard. Like, seriously, that's the "proof" austerity works? At a time when so many are questioning the validity of "growth" as the only metric of sound economics and policy in the first place?)
Also, where they say "liberal economists", do they mean liberal economics, or economics who are also liberals?
hippofant on
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Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
Also, where they say "liberal economists", do they mean liberal economics, or economics who are also liberals?
I'm fairly certain they actually mean "people who disagree with us and therefore do so not on the basis of science but on the basis of personal politics." A bias to which they, thankfully, do not fall prey.
We have had this discussion before and there is a record of one such iteration in a thread devoted to the entire subject. Please do not use this thread as a means to push your incorrect notions of what science is and how any particular field is more or less sciency. The idea that Nature is any more science than Econometrica is wrong
Yeah, clearly the field is one of extraordinary rigor, given that the featured piece from Reinhart and Rogoff passed peer review and was published in a prestigious economic journal while containing basic spreadsheet formula errors. :P
When you can point out an instance of Nature publishing a similarly laughable piece after peer review, we can call the playing field level.
With Love and Courage
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HachfaceNot the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered Userregular
We have had this discussion before and there is a record of one such iteration in a thread devoted to the entire subject. Please do not use this thread as a means to push your incorrect notions of what science is and how any particular field is more or less sciency. The idea that Nature is any more science than Econometrica is wrong
Yeah, clearly the field is one of extraordinary rigor, given that the featured piece from Reinhart and Rogoff passed peer review and was published in a prestigious economic journal while containing basic spreadsheet formula errors. :P
When you can point out an instance of Nature publishing a similarly laughable piece after peer review, we can call the playing field level.
uh
Scientific journals in all fields retract papers with some frequency. Too often these retractions are due to outright fraud.
There's a difference between 'fraud' and 'this piece contained a basic error in the spreadsheet formula, which editors missed'.
It's almost as if economics is a field without concepts like falsifiability or replication (both of which are used in other field of empirical study, not only in pursuit of the creation of actually useful technology, but in the discovery of fraud. As is exemplified in the papers you just linked to).
There's a difference between 'fraud' and 'this piece contained a basic error in the spreadsheet formula, which editors missed'.
It's almost as if economics is a field without concepts like falsifiability or replication (both of which are used in other field of empirical study, not only in pursuit of the creation of actually useful technology, but in the discovery of fraud. As is exemplified in the papers you just linked to).
Dude, I'm a (computational) biologist. Nobody does replication studies. Seriously. It's a common topic of discussion amongst us, the fact that nobody is willing to fund studies that attempt to reproduce the results of other studies, so nobody does them, and consequently, for all we know, bad research gets through all the time. Our quality control mostly comes from people running other, similar experiments or experiments using the already-published data and finding later inconsistencies.
I think someone missed the part of the scandal where it was revealed the paper was never even peer reviewed. In fact, other economists savaged the work when it first came out.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
There's a difference between 'fraud' and 'this piece contained a basic error in the spreadsheet formula, which editors missed'.
It's almost as if economics is a field without concepts like falsifiability or replication (both of which are used in other field of empirical study, not only in pursuit of the creation of actually useful technology, but in the discovery of fraud. As is exemplified in the papers you just linked to).
How would you tell the difference between "a basic error in the spreadsheet formula" and "fraud"?
Cause that would be a really easy way to hide fraud
I think someone missed the part of the scandal where it was revealed the paper was never even peer reviewed. In fact, other economists savaged the work when it first came out.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
Well, dude, how do you want this to work exactly? The typical retractions are pretty fricking hard to understand, often only after thoroughly reading the paper and related background material, never mind being uninteresting. I've noticed mathematical errors in papers before, like a negative sign where they meant a positive, or algorithm errors, where a variable went uninstantiated, but exactly how does one turn something like this into an interesting media piece? Like... the lack of cross-study multiple hypothesis correction (i.e. Bonferroni) results in at least 1 out of every 20 random studies finding that something either causes cancer or prevents it, arising from our usage of 0.05 as a significant p-value threshold. How does one explain that to a layperson in a newspaper article, without them either a) falling asleep, or b) shooting themselves in the face?
I think someone missed the part of the scandal where it was revealed the paper was never even peer reviewed. In fact, other economists savaged the work when it first came out.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
Well, dude, how do you want this to work exactly? The typical retractions are pretty fricking hard to understand, often only after thoroughly reading the paper and related background material, never mind being uninteresting. I've noticed mathematical errors in papers before, like a negative sign where they meant a positive, or algorithm errors, where a variable went uninstantiated, but exactly how does one turn something like this into an interesting media piece? Like... the lack of cross-study multiple hypothesis correction (i.e. Bonferroni) results in at least 1 out of every 20 random studies finding that something either causes cancer or prevents it, arising from our usage of 0.05 as a significant p-value threshold. How does one explain that to a layperson in a newspaper article, without them either a) falling asleep, or b) shooting themselves in the face?
This paper was the backbone for a global political movement that impacted millions of lives. John Stewart had clip after clip of politicians and pundits talking about this paper. The media is a multi-billion industry that employs MDs, PHDs, MBAs and JDs as writers, and has thousands more experts in the address book.
There are lots of reasons why this didn't get covered. An inability to find someone who could understand and explain it isn't the reason.
I think someone missed the part of the scandal where it was revealed the paper was never even peer reviewed. In fact, other economists savaged the work when it first came out.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
Well, dude, how do you want this to work exactly? The typical retractions are pretty fricking hard to understand, often only after thoroughly reading the paper and related background material, never mind being uninteresting. I've noticed mathematical errors in papers before, like a negative sign where they meant a positive, or algorithm errors, where a variable went uninstantiated, but exactly how does one turn something like this into an interesting media piece? Like... the lack of cross-study multiple hypothesis correction (i.e. Bonferroni) results in at least 1 out of every 20 random studies finding that something either causes cancer or prevents it, arising from our usage of 0.05 as a significant p-value threshold. How does one explain that to a layperson in a newspaper article, without them either a) falling asleep, or b) shooting themselves in the face?
This paper was the backbone for a global political movement that impacted millions of lives. John Stewart had clip after clip of politicians and pundits talking about this paper. The media is a multi-billion industry that employs MDs, PHDs, MBAs and JDs as writers, and has thousands more experts in the address book.
There are lots of reasons why this didn't get covered. An inability to find someone who could understand and explain it isn't the reason.
MD's, MBA's, and JD's aren't really qualified to comment on things like this. If you wanted to have an infrastructure to deal with papers like this you would need to employ multiple PHD's in multiple subfields of all fields in order to write a handful of papers marginally better than you could do by just asking PHD's who have other jobs (and so have to do their own research or perish)
Edit: It is both true and bad that no one wants to spend money to pay qualified people to fact check all the science that is done. But how would we do that without a really massive government agency/bureaucracy and would such an organization not have its own issues?
I think someone missed the part of the scandal where it was revealed the paper was never even peer reviewed. In fact, other economists savaged the work when it first came out.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
Well, dude, how do you want this to work exactly? The typical retractions are pretty fricking hard to understand, often only after thoroughly reading the paper and related background material, never mind being uninteresting. I've noticed mathematical errors in papers before, like a negative sign where they meant a positive, or algorithm errors, where a variable went uninstantiated, but exactly how does one turn something like this into an interesting media piece? Like... the lack of cross-study multiple hypothesis correction (i.e. Bonferroni) results in at least 1 out of every 20 random studies finding that something either causes cancer or prevents it, arising from our usage of 0.05 as a significant p-value threshold. How does one explain that to a layperson in a newspaper article, without them either a) falling asleep, or b) shooting themselves in the face?
This paper was the backbone for a global political movement that impacted millions of lives. John Stewart had clip after clip of politicians and pundits talking about this paper. The media is a multi-billion industry that employs MDs, PHDs, MBAs and JDs as writers, and has thousands more experts in the address book.
There are lots of reasons why this didn't get covered. An inability to find someone who could understand and explain it isn't the reason.
MD's, MBA's, and JD's aren't really qualified to comment on things like this. If you wanted to have an infrastructure to deal with papers like this you would need to employ multiple PHD's in multiple subfields of all fields in order to write a handful of papers marginally better than you could do by just asking PHD's who have other jobs (and so have to do their own research or perish)
You miss my point.
The media in the United State routinely hires experts in fields it considers worth covering.Hell, the major networks' medical desks have multiple MDs whose residencies involve writing and producing stories.
There is not a subject on Earth that the American media cannot hire a specialist to translate for a lay audience. They could have an entire economics desk, if they felt a need.
The fact that they don't - until it becomes man bites dog - shows that they've consigned economics to that "he said, she said" political deadzone where things are less covered than spectated at.
I think someone missed the part of the scandal where it was revealed the paper was never even peer reviewed. In fact, other economists savaged the work when it first came out.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
Well, dude, how do you want this to work exactly? The typical retractions are pretty fricking hard to understand, often only after thoroughly reading the paper and related background material, never mind being uninteresting. I've noticed mathematical errors in papers before, like a negative sign where they meant a positive, or algorithm errors, where a variable went uninstantiated, but exactly how does one turn something like this into an interesting media piece? Like... the lack of cross-study multiple hypothesis correction (i.e. Bonferroni) results in at least 1 out of every 20 random studies finding that something either causes cancer or prevents it, arising from our usage of 0.05 as a significant p-value threshold. How does one explain that to a layperson in a newspaper article, without them either a) falling asleep, or b) shooting themselves in the face?
This paper was the backbone for a global political movement that impacted millions of lives. John Stewart had clip after clip of politicians and pundits talking about this paper. The media is a multi-billion industry that employs MDs, PHDs, MBAs and JDs as writers, and has thousands more experts in the address book.
There are lots of reasons why this didn't get covered. An inability to find someone who could understand and explain it isn't the reason.
MD's, MBA's, and JD's aren't really qualified to comment on things like this. If you wanted to have an infrastructure to deal with papers like this you would need to employ multiple PHD's in multiple subfields of all fields in order to write a handful of papers marginally better than you could do by just asking PHD's who have other jobs (and so have to do their own research or perish)
Edit: It is both true and bad that no one wants to spend money to pay qualified people to fact check all the science that is done. But how would we do that without a really massive government agency/bureaucracy and would such an organization not have its own issues?
We're not talking about an obscure paper. These guys were name checked repeatedly in the US Presidential election, the British parliament, Brussels and by dozens of conservative pundits. It was THE paper for the dominant political and economic movement of the early 21st century - austerity. I'll bet that if I fired up Lexis Nexis I'd find thousands of references to the paper and its authors.
And it took a man bites dog story for anyone to fact check it. That's more than a bit worrisome.
This isn't unique to economics though. Amgen took 53 of the most cited papers in cancer research and tried to reproduce the results. Even after talking and collaborating with many of the original authors, only 6 of the papers results could be reproduced. It's hard to be definitive on theories that are new.
"The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
Posts
Yea, I haven't read enough of it, not even the whole PDF so take with salt, I just saw it had decent citation stats when I googled the gist of what I was talking about. I usually try t get my stuff from things I pay for, so citing them on forums can be tough. Unless I wanna dredge the futurist swamp...
Krugman breaks it down pretty well, but basically you would expect there to be influence and correlation between debt and growth numbers over different time periods, and the nature of that influence would depend upon which direction the causality is going (and it can go both ways to some extent). If high past debt was directly causing a slowing of growth like implied by R&R, you'd expect the current debt level at a particular time to be strongly predictive of the growth level or change in growth in the near future, like over the next few years. There would also be some correlation between debt level and level of growth in the near past due to the countries building up the debt over time, but the correlation between future growth and debt levels should be stronger. (Edit: negative correlations, to be clear)
On the flip side, if the causality effects are more important in the other direction, so you are having a ramp up in debt due a declining or downturning economy, and a ramp down of debt due to a strong economy, the strength of the two time based correlations between debt level and growth should be flipped. So the debt level now would be more strongly (negatively) correlated with the past few years of growth than the next few years of growth. The reason for something like this possibly being the case is somewhat obvious if you think about it, a weaker economy often means a decrease in tax revenue which would put an upward pressure on deficits, and a lot of the legacy of Keynes means that governments will often keep up spending and stimulus despite the increase in debt to try to help the economy.
Anyways, here are the resultant graphs:
This is more consistent with the second story, that the causality, if present, flows more strongly from growth to debt level than the other way around.
You'd think big shot economists like Reinhart and Rogoff would think to look into time effects somewhat if they were going to make a big deal about a paper based on this data.
It may be that people earn more now than they did during the industrial revolution, but from what I understand real wages have been stagnant, or even dropped, compared to the previous generation. If demand for labour were to go down, combined with decreasing wages, how could a nation as a whole prevent significant chunks of people from sliding in to poverty? Is there economic policy that could reverse that trend?
Having a social safety net is helpful, but if an additional 1-2% of a nation's population is perpetually on welfare/employment insurance, there would likely be major side effects...or maybe not. Welfare is what, $500 to $1000 dollars per month? assuming the average, $9000 per year times 3-6million people (for the US) is $27-$54 billion per year, which is a lot but not impossible. Maybe the easiest solution to implement without changing trends is to just put people on food stamps.
perpetual welfare for a slowly expanding group is the inevitable future. Once upon a time states did not consider the disabled or old to be entitled to permanent state largesse; today they do. The umbrella is going to creep upwards in size inexorably. Indeed your country's retirees are one of the most powerful interest groups as far as welfare goes, trumping any other welfare cause.
the mystery of stagnant average American real wages is heavily explained by a shift in labour wages from money wages to compensation via healthcare and fund contributions etc., since American law places heavy tax favours on these. once these are taken into account, American real labour compensation is no longer stagnant (although it still lags productivity).
I thought a large cause of amaerican real wages remaining stagnant was also due to greater portions of revenue being devoted to shareholder dividends as opposed to payroll?
MWO: Adamski
By identity if real compensation is not increasing as fast as productivity then either shareholders or management must be capturing the difference.
I am not sure if its dividends that are seeing it (IIRC there haven't been large changes in RoE in the market) and feel like management has probably captured it instead.
I thought I would compare that to canada, since stagnant average real wages is a thing here too, and found this paper that considers causes of the gap between real wage growth and labour productivity growth; the paper also looks at some stats for other OECD countries and seems to suggest this is a common problem, but doesn't go in to detail for anyone but canada. The narrow definition of compensation explains 20% of the gap, according to this paper; the rest is due to other factors: growing earnings inequality, decreasing terms of trade, and fall in labour share of overall gdp. All of which seem kind of bad for labour.
Sorry, I looked back two pages and didn't see that link posted.
i.e., the apparent stagnation in canadian average real wages actually stems from a period that ended in 1997. for roughly 15 years since, canadian real wages have indeed tracked canadian labour productivity.
this is the long-run terms of trade:
where the fall that ended in the 1990s or so becomes obvious
from some discussion here
it's not a commonly-encountered concept, basically it applies the idea of terms of trade between countries - how much stuff you can buy from other countries, for a given unit of the amount of stuff you give up - to a "labour" and a "non-labour" sector within a single country
there are varying definitions; the paper mouserecoil linked defines it as the ratio between the price of stuff that workers consume and the price of stuff generally, whereas the WCI link defines it as the ratio between the price of stuff that workers consume and the price of stuff bought in order to produce stuff that workers consume (i.e., capital goods - factory equipment, etc.).
Stop whinging.
Your work caused a lot of pain and suffering. Now that it's come out that your work wouldn't pass even a basic level of scrutiny, no wonder people are pissed. Accept that you fucked up royally, and show some fucking contrition for the damage you did.
PS. I love the fact that it was the hippies that nailed your asses.
They do deserve the blame and scorn they're getting.
Well. Probably not the hate mail.
I'm of two minds on this one. Mostly on your side of this, though I think that it's not generally a scientist's fault if they produce results that are then used to justify X or Y. But as a scientist, the proper response to a major error like this is not to, ever, double down on the error. You issue a short statement, you take some time to review and redo your work, and reconsider your conclusions, after some really really strong reflection. The fact that their research, credentials, and integrity are under attack is entirely appropriate - it's how science is supposed to work. This sort of thing is exactly what's supposed to haunt my nightmares; it's our equivalent of showing up at school and finding out you're late for an exam you forgot about, naked. It may be a little blown out of proportion for these guys, but that's a consequence of the publicity and importance their work held in the public domain: the higher the climb, the longer the fall. You can't accept the praise that's lavished upon you and reject the criticism when it's similarly heaped. That's cognitive dissonance of the highest order.
And then the other half of it is... I guess it really is best described as whinging. Like they've only realised very recently that their work has been heavily politicized. Where were they when conservative politicians started citing their work as asserting that "90 percent was a magic threshold that transforms outcomes"? It's only now that they're being attacked that they realise social science research is politicized? This just reads like a highly intelligent, "no, it's not true, why are you people being so mean to me?" teenaged reflex response.
They'll probably lay low for like a year, then resume giving intellectual cover for elite consensus as before.
They were wrong. Massively, catastrophically wrong. They didn't 'fake' the results at least, but an error in their methodology means that their work is utter garbage. That doesn't mean that they were 'almost right'. It means that they were wrong. They should apologize, say that they are glad the peer review process is hard at work, and say that they confirm the finding of the error.
It's that they believe that they can do so while simultaneously hiding behind the shield of scholarship. There is a rather large gap between being asked to testify to your own knowledge before a political body and actively lobbying for your own particular agenda. They clearly moved to the latter camp (along with notables such as Paul Krugman).
Once you take this step, you are no longer allowed to claim the cause of intellectual integrity to protect yourself, because you are no longer participating in the world of academic scholarship - you are now participating in the world of politics. Do not play with fire unless you are prepared to get burned. Politicians will find any excuse to pursue their agenda, so don't confuse their use of your ideas to support their position as support of your entire intellectual perspective. I think R&R are quickly learning the lesson that in politics, you don't have to be the fastest - you just have to be faster than the one who gets caught first.
They clearly have a body of strong academic work while also having a body of strong political work. Those two things are entirely separate, and yet they are now using the former to attempt to prevent any criticism of the latter. To be perfectly honest, as a public citizen, I could care less what their research says. That stuff is for the economists to sort out within their own discipline. I do care, however, about what statements they made to politicians when those people asked them what they should do. That is the problem here, regardless of what their papers or research or PPT presentations say.
The academic scrutiny of their work is rather robust and speaks for itself, and largely seems to have taken consensus in that sphere. The political catharsis, however, is not as forthcoming, and their repeated public non-apologies and dissertations containing caveats and straw men are not at all convincing.
Whatever message they espoused to politicians, that message should be front-and-center with none of the hemming and hawing that is particular virulent in "policy" economists today, not whatever they can backtrack and straw man from hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of academic and public writing.
[Edit: grammmaarr]
When you start publishing 'academic papers' and pretending that such a paper deserves the same prestige or perception as a paper published in Nature or Cell, you're being deceptive.
To answer the question of "where were they" the answer is writing editorials in the New York Times explaining how their results mean we should move to austerity and testifying before those same congressman politicizing their work that "we need to act quickly" in order to achieve austerity before it is too late.
Oh the poor poor economists who have had their work politicized! Whomever will bemoan their suffering, brought upon them by the hands of those whom they have not wronged? Their only crime being too proper in explaining their results and all its caveats with those uninterested policy makers.
We have had this discussion before and there is a record of one such iteration in a thread devoted to the entire subject. Please do not use this thread as a means to push your incorrect notions of what science is and how any particular field is more or less sciency. The idea that Nature is any more science than Econometrica is wrong
Basically. I'm vaguely disgusted with me for owning their book.
Giving their response a little more thought, when you really parse it, they basically blame everybody but themselves. They blame their "accusers" at Amherst, they blame the media, they blame conservative politicians, they blame the (liberal) media, the blogosophere, the public realm, ... The mea culpa part of their response is literally half a sentence, and it's even phrased in such a way so as not to be about them: "They correctly identified a spreadsheet coding error...". The inclusion of "spreadsheet coding" even seems to suggest an attempt to minimize the error - it was just a spreadsheet coding error, not a deeper methodological error! (Also, 1% less growth?! Omfg, call the National Guard. Like, seriously, that's the "proof" austerity works? At a time when so many are questioning the validity of "growth" as the only metric of sound economics and policy in the first place?)
Also, where they say "liberal economists", do they mean liberal economics, or economics who are also liberals?
I'm fairly certain they actually mean "people who disagree with us and therefore do so not on the basis of science but on the basis of personal politics." A bias to which they, thankfully, do not fall prey.
Yeah, clearly the field is one of extraordinary rigor, given that the featured piece from Reinhart and Rogoff passed peer review and was published in a prestigious economic journal while containing basic spreadsheet formula errors. :P
When you can point out an instance of Nature publishing a similarly laughable piece after peer review, we can call the playing field level.
uh
Scientific journals in all fields retract papers with some frequency. Too often these retractions are due to outright fraud.
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31519/title/Top-Science-Scandals-of-2011/
And of course you can take natures word for it that about 20% of papers in their journal likely have "misrepresented data"
http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v8/n2/full/ncb0206-101.html
Or that they think that peer review should not be able to prevent situaltions like the R+R one
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v9/n2/full/nn0206-149.html
It's almost as if economics is a field without concepts like falsifiability or replication (both of which are used in other field of empirical study, not only in pursuit of the creation of actually useful technology, but in the discovery of fraud. As is exemplified in the papers you just linked to).
Dude, I'm a (computational) biologist. Nobody does replication studies. Seriously. It's a common topic of discussion amongst us, the fact that nobody is willing to fund studies that attempt to reproduce the results of other studies, so nobody does them, and consequently, for all we know, bad research gets through all the time. Our quality control mostly comes from people running other, similar experiments or experiments using the already-published data and finding later inconsistencies.
It only got to this point because there was an easy to understand error (Excel fuckup) wrapped around a good news hook (intreped grad student from state school exposes Harvard eggheads). If it had been a famous academic questioning the results based on their empirical effects, the media would have shrugged and either ignored it or done a "both sides have a side" muddle of a story.
Ar heart, this is less a story about science and more an example of how fucked the media's priorities are.
How would you tell the difference between "a basic error in the spreadsheet formula" and "fraud"?
Cause that would be a really easy way to hide fraud
Well, dude, how do you want this to work exactly? The typical retractions are pretty fricking hard to understand, often only after thoroughly reading the paper and related background material, never mind being uninteresting. I've noticed mathematical errors in papers before, like a negative sign where they meant a positive, or algorithm errors, where a variable went uninstantiated, but exactly how does one turn something like this into an interesting media piece? Like... the lack of cross-study multiple hypothesis correction (i.e. Bonferroni) results in at least 1 out of every 20 random studies finding that something either causes cancer or prevents it, arising from our usage of 0.05 as a significant p-value threshold. How does one explain that to a layperson in a newspaper article, without them either a) falling asleep, or b) shooting themselves in the face?
This paper was the backbone for a global political movement that impacted millions of lives. John Stewart had clip after clip of politicians and pundits talking about this paper. The media is a multi-billion industry that employs MDs, PHDs, MBAs and JDs as writers, and has thousands more experts in the address book.
There are lots of reasons why this didn't get covered. An inability to find someone who could understand and explain it isn't the reason.
Edit: It is both true and bad that no one wants to spend money to pay qualified people to fact check all the science that is done. But how would we do that without a really massive government agency/bureaucracy and would such an organization not have its own issues?
You miss my point.
The media in the United State routinely hires experts in fields it considers worth covering.Hell, the major networks' medical desks have multiple MDs whose residencies involve writing and producing stories.
There is not a subject on Earth that the American media cannot hire a specialist to translate for a lay audience. They could have an entire economics desk, if they felt a need.
The fact that they don't - until it becomes man bites dog - shows that they've consigned economics to that "he said, she said" political deadzone where things are less covered than spectated at.
We're not talking about an obscure paper. These guys were name checked repeatedly in the US Presidential election, the British parliament, Brussels and by dozens of conservative pundits. It was THE paper for the dominant political and economic movement of the early 21st century - austerity. I'll bet that if I fired up Lexis Nexis I'd find thousands of references to the paper and its authors.
And it took a man bites dog story for anyone to fact check it. That's more than a bit worrisome.