Herndon's Professors Almost Didn't Let Him Start The Paper That Shook The World Austerity Movement

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-herndon-replication-exercise-2013-4



Herndon decided for his project he would attempt to replicate the Reinhart-Rogoff findings, that growth for countries with 90% debt-to-GDP was so bad.

But his professors almost didn't let him take on the project!

Why? Because the actual project of taking a bunch of countries and their growth rates in in various years, and averaging them together is very simple mathematics. It doesn't seem like PHD caliber work.

Professor Pollin told us via email: "The techniques in Reinhart-Rogoff are extremely simple, nothing high-tech at all. So the question between we professors was: would we be asking Thomas to do something sufficiently challenging if he were only to replicate this very simple paper?"


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/thomas-herndon-replication-exercise-2013-4#ixzz2RTLu8irG

[bemildred]

1. Well yeah, it's just simple stuff. why check it?

We have two choices here: either NOBODY ever checked it before (which tells you all you need to know about the "science" of economics) or everybody who ever did check it before is incompetent to do the math (which tells you etc.).

[xchrom]

2. IMO -- you may be right on both counts -- but i do think we have an epidemic of incompetence.

especially institutionally.

[bemildred]

3. A very well-paid, very comfortable, cautious, sort of incompetence ...

You can hear the self-satisfaction in the babble about how it might not be challenging enough. I have heard that tone many times before.

[malaise]

9. 'Peer-reviewed' usually means

agrees with the paradigm we're promoting at this moment in time.

It's all bullshit or this neo-liberal bullshit would have been thrown into the dustbin of history ages ago. The corporatists and fascists have been financing the agenda for way too long.

Who remembers when Jeffrey Sachs was the Harvard gury - until he fucked up eastern Europe and jumped ship.

[xchrom]

10. +1 -- i think my big eye opening came when katrina hit --

and we were exposed to the incompetence of the army corps of engineers, epa, the police, fema, etc.

it was already in the back of my mind -- but i nearly had an exorcist moment when all that happened.

a perfect storm of incompetence.

[magellan]

4. Third choice: the error was intentional, and so was leaving it alone

The austerity crowd is more than arrogant enough to think everyone would take their word that their "science" was sound, and no one would ever check their math.

[bemildred]

5. Hmmm. Well, as it says in the story, this sort of checking of results is discouraged.

And it is easy enough to interpret the hand-waving about how simple it all is as either malice or incompetence.

So I followed Hanlon's Razor and went with well-paid incompetence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

But you are right it's probably a mix.

[malaise]

8. The truth is they are arrogant enough to beleive we do not check anything

including most of the BS spewed by M$Greedia 24/7

[Jim Lane]

12. Fourth choice: People tried to check it, but no one before Herndon was given the data from R&R

When the R&R paper came out, more than one economist wanted to look at the underlying data to check the conclusions, the selection of data, etc. Reinhart and Rogoff declined to provide it. They were criticized at the time for this departure from normal procedure.

Then, a few years later, Herndon asked for the data and Reinhart sent him the spreadsheet.

Thus, one interesting question is why the change. A speculation I've seen on DU that seems plausible to me is that, over time, Reinhart had comfortably settled into a belief that the paper's conclusions were unassailable. She and Rogoff had been hailed around the world, their paper had been widely cited and relied on by leading public officials, so obviously it was correct and the underlying data would fully support the conclusions.

If you think that the Excel error was intentional, you have to explain why, in 2013, Reinhart sent Herndon the previously undisclosed spreadsheet, even though it would reveal the error in a way that would be easy for Herndon to discover and impossible for R&R to refute.

[marmar]

6. k/r

[d_r]

7. I understand the committee's point completely

It wasn't ph.d. calibre work - which begs the question as to why the original authors of this spreadsheet study were ever listened to for their very simple paper in the first place.

[CTyankee]

11. Oh, I think R-R knew full well their "work" would be eagerly, gratefully accepted on its face.

The sale was made. No questions asked.

Herndon is another new hero of mine, right up there next to Dr. Krugman who had to suffer many slings and arrows and gave as well as he got...

[Rex]

13. How could something be so simple and so wrong at the same time?

nt.

[tblue37]

14. Oh, professors, it should be "between US professors"--or more likely, if there are more than two

professors on his committee, "among us professors."

I try not to go all grammarian on regular folks, but professors on doctoral committees should try to use more presentable language. One reason today's students have such poor grammar is that they have such careless models in those who teach them at all levels and in all subjects.

Oh, it was a term paper, not his actual doctoral project. Still, at that academic level the professors should handle their language a bit better. The "between we" error is so widely lamented that it is one error that most reasonably educated people should be aware of.

BTW, in case anyone is wondering, it is perfectly correct to end a sentence with a preposition as I just did. (Actually, that just looks like a preposition. It actually is the adverbial particle of a phrasal verb.)