Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

The bulk of electoral politics rests upon people who do not understand much of anything outside their daily work. They would be the ones you'd be trying to persuade that austerity is a crock by oversimplifying this story and hitting it over and over and over. But for that you need a vehicle like the right wing talk radio noise machine to be really effective.

this isn't a story you can oversimplify when most people don't even really understand what austerity is, that govt spending has gone down under obama etc.

I mean don't get me wrong anytime there is a scandal involving harvard something is going right with the world

any story can be oversimplified, if you don't mind introducing huge distortions, bcz distorting the story is the whole point of reporting it.

I'm just saying it's really hard to get very far w/ 'big academic economics scandal' when most people in this country don't know what gdp is

I think you are arguing about this wrong -- a widely cited study like this is not for the purpose of convincing the electorate, it's for the purpose of convincing legislators, pundits, etc. -- people who have power and or do the convincing. It's not like the electorate ever got or will get a direct vote on government spending anyway. And I'm not saying it converted someone like Paul Ryan into a defecit hawk. But a study like this can make a big difference at the margins -- moderate democrats or republicans otherwise conflicted about whether to cut govt spending now or later etc.

I don't actually think that 'otherwise conflicted' group is especially large in 2013. even 'moderates' approach these things looking for support for their preconceived opinions.

I mean 'serious moderate people rly care about the deficit'...that's almost how they self-define themselves

you can make the argument that small battles are part of the war but timing is everything

nobody on the margins cares about this

this issue is nice fodder but it's not like it's a solid debunking of some widely held belief. It's a pebble in the dam.

Krugman thinks it's both a big deal and not: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/opinion/krugman-the-excel-depression.html?hp

So will toppling Reinhart-Rogoff from its pedestal change anything? I’d like to think so. But I predict that the usual suspects will just find another dubious piece of economic analysis to canonize, and the depression will go on and on.

Just the talking point of the mistake makes a nice mini-catalyst to reenergize the anti-austerity side imo. With a lot of close political issues, just sewing confusion and malaise on your opponent's side gives you enough of an advantage to get something done.

nothing is going to get done because we don't control congress

this is just a win for some bloggers

I mean I'm cool w/ that I read blogs

small victories are generous doses of confirmation bias

so was the study before it was debunked

my supervisor & i found a bunch of these types of errors when we were replicating results last spring. we kind of just shrugged & moved on tho, guess i missed my chance

the story here i think is that excel makes it easy to screw up and people should use more trustworthy systems for crunching publishable numbers.

I vote mechanical pencils and graph paper

fwiw this has been front page of bbc news for the past couple of days (with an "austerity debunked" rather than "lol excel" headline)

lol excel headline

http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/04/17/rogoff-reinhart-excel-errors/

man what kind of fucking scientist uses excel to crunch numbers, a social scientist, that's what kind

totally widespread in econ :-(

real science has too many numbers for excel.

well most of the time if an econ model is too complicated for excel its gonna be mostly nonsense for other reasons

there are many things you can do in excel that you never ever should.

"well most of the time if an econ model is too complicated for excel its gonna be mostly nonsense for other reasons"

lol

i've seen things. horrible things that no man should ever have to see. and done things too. i tell myself i was just following instructions, but sometimes, at night, i wake up screaming and screaming and i couldn't tell you why.

preach it brother paul

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/22/opinion/krugman-the-jobless-trap.html?ref=paulkrugman&_r=1&

there are many things you can do in excel that you never ever should.

lol indeed ... like pivots.

http://www.gamesexcel.com/games-excel-super-mario-bros.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ6Q224UPkc

this one is great but only shows up for me in 240p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_whSnPErl7c

It's all Bush's fault

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/04/23/a-rise-in-wealth-for-the-wealthydeclines-for-the-lower-93/

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/04/SDT-2013-04-wealth-recovery-0-1.png

it's high time we cut taxes on the wealthy again

why 93%/$836,033 as a cutoff, out of curiosity?

oh nm sry:

(The focus in this report on the upper 7% of households rather than some other share of high wealth households reflects the limits of the tabulations published by the Census Bureau. The boundaries of its wealth categories dictated the split of households analyzed in this report.)

if that chart doesn't spur a new round of tax raising, then you people need to abandon hope for this administration

It's almost as if when bush left office all the laws that hugely favored the wealthy signed by him and the last x presidents stayed in effect.

you know, you people

DJIA has doubled since then. FYI.

well the start date kinda matters there

starting it in 1981 would be really interesting too

Even more interesting at 1975

THE UNDERGROUND RECOVERY!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2013/04/29/130429ta_talk_surowiecki?currentPage=all

It’s a huge number: if the government managed to collect taxes on all that income, the deficit would be trivial. This unreported income is being earned, for the most part, not by drug dealers or Mob bosses but by tens of millions of people with run-of-the-mill jobs—nannies, barbers, Web-site designers, and construction workers—who are getting paid off the books.

a lot of those people would wind up paying little or no federal income tax anyway (although they would certainly pay payroll taxes), so I think the deficit assumption here is a bit off

don weiner sometimes it seems like you believe you have been sent here to troll us into seeing the light, but that if we don't soon see the error of our ways, you will forlornly return to your home planet

Off-the-books activity also helps explain a mystery about the current economy: even though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with.

we're all undocumented now