Correction Appended 
 
 HOUSTON, Sept. 14 - The secretary for the squadron commander purported to be the author of now-disputed memorandums questioning President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard said Tuesday that she never typed the documents and believed that they are fakes. 
 
 But she also said they accurately reflect the thoughts of the commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, and other memorandums she typed for him about Mr. Bush. "The information in them is correct," the woman, Marian Carr Knox, now 86, said in an interview at her home here. "But I doubt,'' she said, pausing, "it's not anything that I wrote because there are terms in there that are not used by Guards, the format wasn't the way we did it. It looks like someone may have read the originals and put that together." 
 
 "We did discuss Bush's conduct and it was a problem Killian was concerned about," Mrs. Knox said. "I think he was writing the memos so there would be some record that he was aware of what was going on and what he had done." But, she said, words like "billets," which appear in the memorandums, were not standard Guard terms. 
 
 Mrs. Knox, who was the secretary for the squadron at Ellington Air Force Base from 1957 to 1979, said she recalled Mr. Bush's case and the criticism of him because his record was so unusual. Mr. Killian had her type memorandums recording the problems, she said, and he kept them in a private file under lock and key. She said she had never voted for Mr. Bush because she disliked his record in office. 
 
 Mr. Killian died in 1984; his widow and son have said that they did not find any memorandums among the private effects they cleared from his office after his death. Mr. Killian's son, Gary, who also served at the squadron and who initially thought that the signatures on the documents matched his father's, has come to believe they are fakes, and said he doubted Mrs. Knox's account, though he recalled her fondly. 
 
 "She's a sweet old lady, but she's wrong and it didn't happen,'' he said. "I always thought well of her, and I know my dad would have also, but she's a sweet old lady.'' 
 
 Mrs. Knox's comments add to the mystery around the four memorandums that were reported by CBS News last Wednesday, which indicated that Mr. Bush had been suspended from flying because he failed to meet standards and report for a physical examination and that Mr. Killian felt pressure to "sugarcoat" his rating because the young Lieutenant Bush, then the son of a congressman, was "talking to someone upstairs." 
 
 Executives at CBS said Tuesday that they continued to stand by their statements that they believe the documents are authentic, despite the new questions, and concern from others inside the network, and a report on ABC News that two more experts whom CBS News had consulted to authenticate the documents for its report said they had expressed concerns about the documents' authenticity to the network's producers. 
 
 When questions about the documents first arose last week, the anchor Dan Rather said at least four experts had helped convince the network of their authenticity. 
 
 But the network has continually declined to provide the name of more than one of those experts. That one, Marcel B. Matley, said in interviews that he validated only that the signature on the documents was Colonel Killian's. But, he said, he did not vouch for the documents themselves and could not rule out that the signature had been cut and pasted onto the records. 
 
 On Tuesday, two more experts came forward and said they had been consulted by CBS. One, a forensic document examiner from Texas, Linda James, said in a telephone interview with The New York Times that she noticed indications that the two documents she inspected were the product of a word processor and relayed that to the producers. 
 
 "I had questioned the superscript on there," she said, referring to the raised letters that appear after the number 111 to indicate the name of the flight squadron, adding she also had some questions about what she believed were some inconsistencies in the documents' signatures. She said she was awaiting more documents and more type samples to draw a stronger conclusion but with time running out she referred the network to another expert, who officials at CBS identified as Mr. Matley. 
 
 
 
 ||||| Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have become known for warning that debt-to-GDP ratios over 90 percent are linked to poor economic growth. But a new working paper from economists at the University of Massachusetts says Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings are created by bad methodology. They seem to have a point. 
 
 
 
 Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin say that the Reinhart-Rogoff finding of sharply lower average growth in high-debt countries rests on three errors: a bad weighting method, inexplicable exclusion of data from certain countries and years, and an Excel coding error. After fixing those problems, they find that “average GDP growth at public debt/GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt/GDP ratios are lower.” 
 
 
 
 Yesterday’s defenses from Reinhart and Rogoff are most notable for what they do not contain: a defense of the methodology that Herndon and his colleagues criticize. Instead, they make two main arguments. One is that a 2012 paper, which Reinhart and Rogoff wrote with Vincent Reinhart, supports their finding that high debt is associated with low growth, as do several papers from other researchers. Their other response is that the really important matter is median performance, not the mean performance statistic that the UMass researchers are critiquing. 
 
 
 
 “We have generally emphasized the 1% differential median result in all our discussions and subsequent writing,” Rogoff told me in an e-mail. That is, in the graphic of means and medians below, from their 2010 American Economic Review paper (similar free version available here), the really important statistic is the median growth figure. That number is about 1 percentage point lower for the high-debt countries, not the average figure that falls off a cliff. 
 
 In the same e-mail, Rogoff points out that 1 percent less GDP growth per year is a big deal. “Note that because the historical public debt overhang episodes last an average of over 20 years, the cumulative effects of small growth differences are potentially quite large. It is utterly misleading to speak of a 1% growth differential that lasts 10-25 years as small.” 
 
 This isn't a very satisfying defense, for two reasons. 
 
 One is the simple sloppiness of the apparent error that Reinhart and Rogoff made in calculating the average GDP growth for high-debt countries. Barry Ritholtz put it well: “Whenever you hear the phrase ‘the fundamental case is intact,’ you best run screaming from the room.” It’s reminiscent of the “fake but accurate” defense of the forged memos about President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. 
 
 Dean Baker has a good breakdown of what went wrong. What happened is that Reinhart and Rogoff included data from New Zealand in 1951, a year when debt/GDP exceeded 90 percent and GDP growth was -7.6 percent. But they excluded New Zealand data for the period 1946 to 1949, when debt also exceeded 90 percent and growth was often very strong. Include those years, and New Zealand’s average economic growth in high debt years is not -7.6 percent but +2.6 percent. 
 
 
 
 Because there were only seven countries in the data set that Reinhart and Rogoff used to calculate average GDP growth under high debt conditions, and because they weighted each country’s average growth equally, getting New Zealand wrong by more than 10 percentage points was a very big deal, shaving 1.5 percentage points off their estimate of average growth. 
 
 This error seems to negate the main reason that the Reinhart-Rogoff paper got so much attention in the first place, since observers tended to fixate on the growth cliff for high-debt countries, a cliff apparently created solely by this New Zealand-related oversight. 
 
 Early this morning, Reinhart and Rogoff put out a more detailed response saying they excluded the pre-1950 New Zealand data because it was newly available at the time they published the paper in 2010 and they had “not yet vetted the comparability and quality” of those data. They take exception to the claim that the omission of the pre-1950 data was “selective.” 
 
 
 
 Even if Reinhart and Rogoff had a plausible reason for leaving out these data, the huge effect of the exclusion demonstrates the fragility of their method: New Zealand is one of just a handful of rich countries that experienced a debt-to-GDP ratio over 90 percent since World War II, and leaving those years in or out materially changes the conclusion about the average growth rate of such countries. 
 
 And what of Rogoff’s point that even Herndon et al. agree that higher debt is associated with slower growth? The most damaging response to this is a figure near the back of the UMass paper, plotting every observation of GDP growth and debt-to-GDP ratio from the advanced countries, from the 2010 Reinhart-Rogoff paper. This figure seems to show what Rogoff says it does: Even the UMass researchers’ take on the data show a negative relationship between government debt and GDP growth. 
 
 Unfortunately for Reinhart and Rogoff, the most notable feature of this chart is not the trend. It is how weakly the data fit the trend. Is this a chart that suggests to you that countries seeking to improve real GDP growth should focus on constraining their ratios of public debt to GDP? 
 
 Such policies pose significant economic risks and human costs, and yet what this chart tells you is that low debt and poor growth, and high debt and strong growth, are both reasonably common outcomes. 
 
 Unlike the cliff chart that made the Reinhart-Rogoff paper so arresting, this way of looking at the data suggests that the historical performance of countries with varying debt-to-GDP ratios has little to tell us about what today’s fiscal policies should be. 
 
 (Josh Barro is lead writer for the Ticker. Follow him on Twitter.) 
 
 ||||| 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.
– For years, conservatives have been crowing about a study from Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff showing that countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio of more than 90% usually have negative GDP growth. It's been used to justify austerity pushes around the globe. But Reinhart and Rogoff have always refused to actually reveal their data, and now a new paper has found that they excluded years of inconvenient data and made various other errors and weird choices that, when corrected, show that average GDP actually comes out positive, writes Alex Pareene at Salon. "This is important—it should in fact be a Big Deal—because Reinhart and Rogoff have been the ultimate authorities" for austerity fans, he writes. "It is sort of shocking, to me, that respected economists can release a widely cited paper without just putting their damn Excel spreadsheet online." Reinhart and Rogoff have tried to defend themselves, but not very convincingly, writes Josh Barro at Bloomberg. "It is reminiscent of the 'fake but accurate' defense of the forged memos" questioning President Bush's National Guard service. Check out Barro's full column for an in-depth breakdown. Or click for Pareene's full post.