Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

that's one of the great stories of this week, tipsy

the original paper was so shoddy regardless that even if the results 'were real' they were meaningless

I think there's been a little exaggeration when it comes to how important that result was - I def remember it being cited, but you can pretty much come up w/ a 'serious economics paper' that supports any political view. it's not like this made paul ryan decide to be a lol 'deficit hawk' it was just the latest bit of nonsense in a long stream of nonsense

some details http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/influential-reinhart-rogoff-economics-paper-suffers-database-error/

When a paper becomes widely cited and influential because it is the strongest available defense of a political position, then finding out that it botched its math and left out a big bunch of numbers that contradict its most basic assertion, that's a nasty blow to the authors. They are now extremely embarassed and must live this down.

It only becomes a nasty blow to the politics of the situation if the media start to blow it up into one, such as what happened to the accusation (later proved false) that some scientists in Britain were falsifying their globla warming data. The right wing press pounded that HARD and it did a lot of damage.

The chances that liberals will use this to smash their opponents in the mouth repeatedly and as viciously as possible are vanishingly small. Liberals are no good at street fighting.

anybody who could understand the significance of this already has entrenched views on austerity

that's kind of true on all polarizing issues to a degree tho

and austerity is def a polarizing issue

yep, which is why msot of these news stories aren't of much significance. I mean 'we won' yeah cool, it's a shame these guys don't work somewhere where they can get fired.

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.