Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Reinhart & Rogoff vs. Krugman

http://www.businessinsider.com/reinhart-and-rogoff-vs-krugman-2013-5
 
 
Carmen Reinhart And Ken Rogoff Write Huge, Brutal Letter To Paul Krugman 
Blasting Him For Being Uncivil
 
Joe Weisenthal	 | May 26, 2013, 10:24 AM
 
Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — the two economists whose paper on 
the negative effects of high debt loads was exposed as flawed by a grad 
student — have written a long letter to Paul Krugman 
(
http://www.carmenreinhart.com/letter-to-pk/
), blasting him for being 
uncivil and unprofessional in how he treats them in his writing.
The letter is quite long, not just going through Krugman's tone, but 
also in going through his past work and their past work to defend the 
work they continue to do.
 
Here's the key personal bit.
 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 25 2013
Dear Paul:
 
Back in the late 1980s, you helped shape the concept of an emerging 
market debt overhang.  The financial crisis has laid bare the fact that 
the dividing line between emerging markets and advanced countries is not 
as crisp as once thought.  Indeed, this is a recurring theme of our 2009 
book, This Time is Different:  Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. 
Today, the growth bind of advanced countries in the periphery of the 
eurozone has a great deal in common with that of emerging market 
economies of the 1980s.
We admire your past scholarly work, which influences us to this day.  So 
it has been with deep disappointment that we have experienced your 
spectacularly uncivil behavior the past few weeks.  You have attacked us 
in very personal terms, virtually non-stop, in your New York Times 
column and blog posts.  Now you have doubled down in the New York Review 
of Books, adding the accusation we didn't share our data.  Your 
characterization of our work and of our policy impact is selective and 
shallow.  It is deeply misleading about where we stand on the issues. 
And we would respectfully submit, your logic and evidence on the policy 
substance is not nearly as compelling as you imply.
You particularly take aim at our 2010 paper on the long-term secular 
association between high debt and slow growth. That you disagree with 
our interpretation of the results is your prerogative.  Your thoroughly 
ignoring the subsequent literature, however, including the International 
Monetary Fund's work as well as our own deeper and more complete 2012 
paper with Vincent Reinhart, is troubling.   Perhaps, acknowledging the 
updated literature-not to mention decades of theoretical, empirical, and 
historical contributions on drawbacks to high debt-would inconveniently 
undermine your attempt to make us a scapegoat for austerity.  You write 
"Indeed, Reinhart-Rogoff may have had more immediate influence on public 
debate than any previous paper in the history of economics."
Setting aside this wild hyperbole, you never seem to mention our other 
line of work that has surely been far more influential when it comes to 
responding to the financial crisis.  Specifically, our 2009 book 
(released before our growth and debt work) showed that recoveries from 
deep systemic financial crises are long, slow and painful.  This was not 
the common wisdom at all before us, as you yourself have acknowledged 
on more than one occasion.  Over the course of the crisis, and certainly 
by 2010, policymakers around the world were using our research, 
alongside their assessments, to help justify sustained macroeconomic 
easing of both monetary and fiscal policy fronts.
Your desire to blame our later 2010 paper for the stances of some 
politicians fails to recognize a basic reality:  We were out there 
endorsing very different policies.  Anyone with experience in these 
matters knows that politicians may float a citation to an academic paper 
if it suits their purposes.  But there are limits to how much policy 
traction they can get with this device when the paper's authors are out 
offering very different policy conclusions.  You can refer to the 
appendix to this letter for our views on policy through the financial 
crisis as they were stated publicly in real time.  We were not silent.
Very senior former policy makers, observing the attacks of the past few 
weeks, have forcefully explained that real-time policies are very seldom 
driven to any significant extent by a single academic paper or result.
It is worth noting that in the past, polemicists have often pinned the 
austerity charge on the International Monetary Fund for its work with 
countries having temporary or permanent debt sustainability issues. 
Since its origins after World War II, IMF programs have almost always 
involved some combination of austerity, debt restructurings, and 
structural reform.  When a country that has been running large deficits 
is suddenly no longer able to borrow new funds, some measure of 
adjustment is invariably required, and one of the IMF's usual roles has 
been to serve as a lightning rod.   Even before the IMF existed, long 
periods of autarky and hardship accompanied debt crises.
Now let us turn to the substance. The events of the past few weeks do 
not change basic facts and fundamentals.
 
Krugman has responded in a much shorter post, not taking on nearly the 
whole letter, identifying what he sees and Reinhart and Rogoff's key sin:
 
There is, as everyone in this debate has acknowledged, a negative 
correlation in the data between debt and growth. As a result, draw a 
line at any point — 80 percent, 90 percent, whatever — and countries 
with debt above that level will tend to have slower growth than 
countries with debt below that level.
There is, however, an enormous difference between the statement 
“countries with debt over 90 percent of GDP tend to have slower growth 
than countries with debt below 90 percent of GDP” and the statement 
“growth drops off sharply when debt exceeds 90 percent of GDP”. The 
former statement is true; the latter isn’t. Yet R&R have repeatedly 
blurred that distinction, and have continued to do so in recent writings.
-- 
Namib
.....
αἱ ψυχαὶ ὀσμῶνται καθ᾽ Ἅιδην (Eraclito)

 Blasting Him For Being Uncivil
 
un keynesiano (ovvero in una scala da 0 liberista a 100 comunista un
10 scarso) percula sacrosantemente i teorici dell'austerità, e con chi
si schiera il "comunista" Namib? Con gli austeritari liberisti. Coma
da copione catto(commie)....

 si schiera il "comunista" Namib?
 
Con chi si schiera? :)
