This surprises me - Reinhart and Rogoff are both very well respected economists, and neither is a culture warrior type - they've published enough (Including "This Time Its Different", a great book to understand the history of financial crises) that I almost wonder if there's more to this than meets the eye at first glance. I realize the first tendency is to "burn the witch", but I'd like to learn more.
Not any more. This is a career killer. I wouldn't be surprised to see them accepting posts with the American Enterprise Institute or Cato in short order.
I realize most of HN is left-of-center, but Cato in particular is not fluff. Specifically on the two, Rogoff was Chief Economist of the IMF (I spent a summer interning when he was there), and no one considers either of these economists as crazy-right wing types (the IMF, by American political standards, is probably a centrist Democratic type, even if it does make some very stupid calls for austerity from time to time).
There's always room for disagreement because economics is the dismal science (as one famous line put it, Harry Truman wanted to find a one-handed economist - so they wouldn't always answer "X could happen, on the other hand, Y could happen), and answers aren't as binary as they sometimes are in the hard sciences. I'm curious to see what Rogoff and Reinhart respond to this with.
Edit: thanks for the Ritholz piece - hadn't seen that. I certainly am not claiming that there's no mistake - I just want to see what the defendants in this have to say, so to speak.
I wasn't casting aspersions on their previous credentials, but if anything that magnifies the seriousness of this situation. It looks a lot like unethical cherry picking of data (the 'coding error' is really of secondary importance to me).
I know economics can be considered on the transition from hard to soft sciences, and even within the field you have very soft-science schools like the Austrians to very quantitative approaches like 'freshwater'. But that doesn't seem to apply here. Maybe if they added caveats to their methodology it would have been different.
I'm also not dismissing Cato or AEP out of hand, but nobody can deny that they are partisan think tanks. Their primary purpose is to provide cover for policy proposals, not original research.
Reinhart and Rogoff's response here: Matt Yglesias has been covering this somewhat gleefully. But as they point out, they called it an association, not a cause (correlation, not causation).
Thanks for the link to their response. I am going to try to refrain from further comment until I've look at the other papers they reference and beyond the summary of what's alleged.
That being said, and paraphrasing Yglesias, that association/causation disclaimer from them is really weak sauce. I don't recall such protestations while the paper was a cause celebre.
