Whoops! Turns out debt doesn’t ruin economies.
A paper justifying international austerity measures had a couple mistakes that totally undermine its argument
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are two very, very well-respected Harvard economists. They are the authors of a very well-received account of the financial crisis and its antecedents. In 2010 they released a paper that is among the most influential economic papers of the modern era. The paper argued that countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio above 90 percent average negative GDP growth. (The paper also suggested that correlation is causation, in the direction neoliberal misers prefer.) In other words, this was, for many people, concrete proof — with numbers and a chart — that government debt is bad for the economy and should be reduced even in the midst of a recession and an employment crisis. The authors have briefed leaders and legislators around the world on their finding, and the paper has essentially been used to justify most debt hysteria around the world, since its publication.
But! Whoops, turns out they were wrong, about that one central fact that has been repeated as the gospel truth by purveyors of Tough Talk on debt the world over for the last three years.
They screwed up their spreadsheet. Turns out average GDP growth in countries with debt-GDP ratios 90 percent and higher is positive, not negative.
The error was revealed in a new paper by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and written about by Mike Konczal. Those authors also noted a couple counties had years of data excluded — data that would’ve undermined Reinhart and Rogoff’s argument — and criticized the way Reinhart and Rogoff weighted each country’s data in a way that privileges years of high debt and low growth over years of high debt and regular growth.
The reason we are just now getting critical second looks at Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings now, when the paper in question came out in 2010, is that the economists just didn’t release their data. Here’s Dean Baker complaining about that fact in 2010. As he wrote: “Mr Rogoff and Ms. Reinhart have declined to adhere to standard ethics within the economics profession and have refused to share the data on which they base their conclusion with other researchers.”
So, austerity’s canceled, right? Haha, no, sorry.
The rest:
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/17/whoops_turns_out_debt_doesnt_ruin_economies/
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John Maynard Keynes is laughing from his grave.
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