Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems
nextnewdeal.net
nextnewdeal.net
Let me repeat that: there is NO EVIDENCE that more government debt causes slower economic growth -- just theories.
I wonder what all the government deficit scaremongers will say to this!
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PS. For reference, the often-cited paper by Reinhart and Rogoff can be downloaded at http://www.nber.org/papers/w15639.pdf and the new paper debunking it can be downloaded at http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/worki...
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PS#2. An Excel typo was partly to blame for Reinhart and Rogoff's errors! Reminds me of the Excel typo that allowed the "London Whale" silently to rack up billions of dollars in unexpected losses at JP Morgan: http://baselinescenario.com/2013/02/09/the-importance-of-exc...
Correct, 90% is not the magical, universal debt/GDP:dGDP inflection point it was made out to be.
"there is NO EVIDENCE that more government debt causes slower economic growth"
Whoah, whoah. Try the refutation paper [1]. It finds "that average GDP growth tails off somewhat when the public debt/GDP ratio increases towards 120 percent."
There is no strong inflection point ("the scatterplot does suggest a non-linearity in the relationship, but that occurs in the change in the public debt/GDP ratio from 0 to 30 percent"). But there is a monotonically decreasing debt/GDP:dGDP relationship.
It is more subtle than previously characterised, and thus potentially mitigatable in the short term, but let's not take Einstein's refutation of Newtonian physics to mean gravity doesn't exist.
[1] http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/worki...
The reality of the budget drama in Congress is that it's almost entirely about the house majority stymieing any forward momentum by the current administration at just about any cost. This is why Congress has such a low approval rating.
Translation(?): the econometric models used to measure the length of the road were off by a little bit, we have more time to kick the can.
Econometric models are descriptive in any case (they are measuring quantities that are based on the human actions causing those metrics, those metrics are not controlling those behaviors), past performance is no guarantee of future behavior.
If you trim debt by a little and hurt GDP growth by a little, you wind up with the same ratio you had before. If you trim debt in a way that really hurts GDP, you'll likely increase the debt:GDP ratio.
The original paper implied that we'd wind up in a spiral of shrinking GDP, increasing that ratio, shrinking the GDP more, and so on. But it turns out it was complete bullshit.
I don't get it. I was in sync with the Left when they decried George W. Bush's no-veto policy and ballooning of the debt. Now that "their guy" is in the WhiteHouse, they no longer agree that it's irresponsible to set the deficit meter on 11 and walk away like we have been.
Can't we all agree that this guy was totally correct? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuTG19Cu_Q
I guess I wouldn't be so against some amount of debt if it looked like we had it under control. It's funny that we're dissecting the results of a study on what 90% debt:GDP would do. Well that was back in 2010, we've blown way past 90%. We're at 107% as of 2012 and climbing.
It's not just about the debt's exact impact at a certain percentage. If it were just that, we could debate it and fine tune it. It's about our Government's complete inability to get it under control.
Maybe 90% Debt:GDP won't hurt too badly, but sooner or later as it rises, it will crater even our economy.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone on the left who understands the issues who is seriously arguing that deficits are never a problem, or never have to be dealt with. What a lot of us ARE arguing is that as long as we have an aggregate demand shortfall (everyone in the economy trying to save at once), paying attention to the debt is exactly the wrong thing to do, since the government is the only actor in the economy that has the freedom to act counter-cyclically and make up for the shortfall in private sector demand. The ultimate goal is to start a virtuous cycle of spending that gets us back toward full employment (and increases GDP). Then and only then does it make sense for the government to try to reduce debt through cuts.
There's decent evidence (see Delong & Summers 2012: http://delong.typepad.com/20120320-conference-draft-final-ca...) that trying to reduce debt through cuts in an economy like we have right now is counter-productive even on it's own terms (reducing the debt-gdb ratio) because any cuts you make further reduce aggregate demand and thus reduce the GDB side of that ratio even further.
It's not a democrat in the white house vs. republican in the white house thing that is causing people who were complaining about deficits under GWB to advocate against cutting short term spending now. It's all about the underlying economic conditions.
And where is that evidence? Included in that evidence, I'd like to see a model that predicted what actually DID happen when we tried the "stimulus" that Obama's economic advisers predicted would lower unemployment to <6% or better.
If you don't have a model that predicts things before they happened consistently, then it isn't Science. It's just guessing.
If we're going to guess, then we should fall back on models that we do understand and have a lot of data for, like how businesses and households manage debt. Common sense should be trumping guessing based upon esoteric economic models that haven't yet yielded reproducible results.
Responding to the complaint about Obama's economic advisors being wrong is easy - they were wildly optimistic. However, plenty of economists including Paul Krugman were saying this at the time (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/opinion/09krugman.html?par... - note the date Jan 9, 2009, before Obama was even sworn in). The math is pretty basic - according to the aggregate demand view of the crisis you have a combined housing/financial shock that totaled at least 6% of GDB. The stimulus was MAYBE 1.5% of GDB, and that's being generous with assuming that high end tax cuts are just as effective as outright spending money (I would argue that they are not, since in a saver's economy, much of that money is just saved straight away). The Obama stimulus package was 4+ times too small to address the magnitude of the problem by this model; no one who has this view of the world is surprised that unemployment is still high (the only surprise was that Obama's advisors had such a rosy-eyed, not data-driven view of the world. They deserve a LOT of criticism for that).
Your "fall back on models that we do understand and have a lot of data for, like how businesses and households manage debt" is completely at odds with reality for two reasons. One is that it doesn't really imply what you say it does; most rational, not capitally constrained businesses/households (and the US is emphatically not capital constrained - bond yields are as low as they've ever been) invest when they have absurdly low interest rates - you're basically getting free money from the market, it's not a rational response to cut back in a situation like that. The second, and arguably more important, argument, however, is that the government occupies a fairly special position in the economy, since it alone among economic actors will never run out of money. Therefore, the government has the unique ability to act in a counter cyclical manner - it can counteract the collective saving of businesses/households to stimulate demand during recessions, and pull back when the private sector is roaring. (You give me 5% unemployment and 4-5%/yr GDP growth and I will be all for govt deficit reduction)
The government... will never run out of money.
(Honest question here) I'm curious when we should expect to see the huge inflation created by the QE program, and why we haven't seen it yet if it began nearly 5 years ago...
Am I missing something?
Keyesians argue that money supply doesn't cause inflation on its own. Probably worth looking into that, since the predictions it provides seems to match reality pretty closely..
Meanwhile hyper-inflation in Russia in the 90's used the dollar as a stable currency with which rubles were exchanged for dollars. Hyper-inflation in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria occurred in part due to easily exchange and convertibility of the Deutschmark.
The government is a facilitator of commerce. It's not built to make a profit. It doesn't have the trust circle of a family. It is fundamentally political by mandate and by nature. It couldn't be less common!
Let me offer a crude analogy:
Before: 'Don't press down so hard on the accelerator (debt finance), or you will drive this car (economy) into the ditch (recession).'
(crash)
After: 'You need to push down on the accelerator to get out of the ditch and back onto the road.'
That's Keynesianism in a nutshell. If/when the economy is again growing at a decent clip, then government spending should be reduced (as a % of GDP and revenue, not necessarily in absolute terms) and debt service increased. Of course, that doesn't always happen.
Maybe 90% Debt:GDP won't hurt too badly, but sooner or later as it rises, it will crater even our economy.
But the reality is taht the debt probably won't rise that much as time goes on, because it'll be offset by increased revenues from increased growth. The 2010 R-R paper argued (incorrectly) that such growth would never happen due to the high debt load.
The second important argument is that (again, right now), this emphasis on austerity is actively making things worse.
Well since we've exploded our debt to supposedly lower unemployment and the meter has barely moved, maybe we're doing it wrong? We've indulged the Keynesians quite enough over the last $6+ TRILLION dollars, tyvm.
I see people in this thread demanding evidence that more debt is bad for the country. Well where the hell is the evidence that shows that staggering debt is good for the country?
Maybe we should fall back on common sense "household" or "business" models until that evidence appears, huh?
this emphasis on austerity is actively making things worse.
What austerity? I've heard some talking about it, but we're not practicing it anywhere. Don't you dare use the word "sequester", because that was a joke.
The sequester is real, but it may take more time for the effects to reverberate throughout the country.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/02/27/sequest...
That is a complete non-sequitur. The amount a grant from one federal entity is reduced is not limited to the same percentage as the total federal budget.
Keep the fat and cut the muscle makes great sense when you are commanded to drop 1.5% of mass and you want to make the case you're going to lose a ton of strength.
That really doesn't help your case.
Also, these cuts aren't even close to what are desired by a certain segment of law makers. If that desired austerity were to be put in place, and you think agencies at trying to make an examples now, their current examples would pale in comparison to what we would see.
If it is so easy to say an agency doesn't need to cut X when they can cut Y, then pass a bill cutting Y.
I don't know how educated people concerned about politics and the economic health of this country could not read these kinds of stories that come over the wire and know that there's an extraordinary amount of waste in the Federal government that could easily be cut.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2011-02-19/news/fl-federal-...
Unfortunately, so many voters have their heads in the sand and don't know what's going on - or worse yet, they're doing like you are here and propagating misinformation.
First, most of the debt racked up was not even remotely related to stimulus. So it's not like we have $6tn in stimulus. But mostly, even if it was, the hole we blew in our economy was much larger than even that $6tn.
Many, if not most, Keynesians agree with this -- that the current US policy has been all wrong, even while it some elements were correct in very broad outline. And they were saying that when the policies were proposed, not just when they failed to work.
> We've indulged the Keynesians quite enough over the last $6+ TRILLION dollars, tyvm.
No, what we've done is adopted incoherent policies that are driven by some impulse toward Keynesian with some directly contrary impulses (in part, this is a consequence of different branches of government having different preferences.)
Shouldn't we be instead be giving more credence to those who said that the stimulus wouldn't accomplish what the Administration was selling? Since those contrarians were right?
You say that it would have been "worse", but how much worse? The justification for adding such a huge amount to our debt was the big return. If the stimulus got us to 7.7% unemployment right now, but without it we'd be at 7.9%... then maybe we should have not incurred so much more debt?
>Maybe 90% Debt:GDP won't hurt too badly, but sooner or later as it rises, it will crater even our economy.
Nobody's suggesting that an infinitely high Debt:GDP is a good thing, but a lot of people were using R-R to argue that we had to prioritize debt reduction now as an emergency even at the expense of stimulating the economy or else we'd wind up as some sort of hybrid Greece/Zimbabwe mess within 5 years.
>It's about our Government's complete inability to get it under control.
I don't really know that that's clear. We've had a period of time where the budget deficits were run up to pay for a major (Cold) war and the tax reforms, and then we ran very low deficits and surpluses in the 1990s. We were basically set such that we'd run a surplus during strong economic years (as the Tech Bubble was) and a slight deficit in weaker ones. We made a series of policy decisions that harmed the budget balance (Iraq, tax cuts, bad policy in Medicare D) but even then, our deficits were still in the neighborhood of nominal GDP growth. So we're actually doing kinda OK, though obviously not great. Then we have the mini-depression, which (a) reduced GDP well below potential, (b) reduced tax revenues due to people making less money, and (c) caused automatic stabilizer payouts (food stamps, unemployment, disability) to rise. It's not like we've been pushing through un-offset new annual spending this last half-decade, beyond the original TARP and ARRA. So if the economy recovers, we'll probably start to level off back into 2005-era deficits, where the deficit/GDP < nominal GDP growth, causing the debt/GDP to shrink.
No one thinks a ballooning deficit is good, some of us just think it's less bad than cutting social security and medicaid in the middle of a recession.
If you look at the whole picture you have to either say that this extended period of higher unemployment is the new 'natural rate of unemployment' or admit that something might be off.
The Left never decried Bush ballooning the debt, the Left decried Bush ballooning the debt by cutting taxes in a manner which disproportionately favored the rich and focussing massive additional spending on unnecessary war -- that is, he was decried by the left for the <i>distribution</i> of taxation and spending as the debt was being ballooned, not for the balance of taxes vs. spending.
(Secondarily, the Republican Party as a whole was decried by the Left at that time for ballooning the debt to advance those policies after having recently previously taken the position that budget balance was a pre-eminent government priority, a position which Republicans surprisingly returned to embracing once they no longer controlled the White House.)
Regardless of 'who's guy' is in the White House I maintain there's a difference between inheriting a surplus and turning it into a deficit (during the dotcom bust), and inheriting a trillion dollar deficit and not fixing it right away (during the worst crash since 1929).
Um, no.
Speaking as a proud member of The Left, we objected to blowing the Clinton era surplus by slashing revenue, starting one (or two) unnecessary war(s), and huge wet sloppy kisses to corporations (eg scripts under Medicare Plan-D).
If Bush The Lesser had maintained full employment, deficit or not, The Left would have loved him.
However, if the economy stalls and GDP growth slows, that leads to lower tax revenues and higher transfer payments (unemployment, etc), which will contribute directly to the deficit.
The level of confusion one sees in most any discussion of government debt/deficits is really mindblowing sometimes.
And that's a big deal. Even if you want to claim that high debt slows growth, your economy won't implode, and the political arguments have used the concerns over implosion as the dire necessity to deal with the public debt.
Obviously someone is on the receiving end of those repayments, but if that someone is not putting money in the pockets of those same taxpayers and instead decides to finance a power plant in Thailand then GDP will inevitably suffer.
I'm not a government deficit scaremonger by any means. I think Krugman's (and others') argument that the U.S. government can borrow very cheaply and should therefore act in a countercyclical manner for the common good is plausible. I'm also convinced that the crowding out argument is bogus in an economy that suffers from too little demand whilst corporations are sitting on tons of cash.
But we should not lose sight of the fact that interest rates are a highly psychological affair. Once trust in the ability to repay debt gets eroded things can get out of control very quickly. So we should be scared at least a little bit.
That said, the U.S is probably the one entity on this planet that is furthest away from that point. Even Japan with it's 245% debt/GDP ratio can borrow at 0.5% for 10 years whilst their currency is crashing and the central bank is announcing a massive QE program twice the size of the U.S one.
But if the U.S ever gets to the point where Japan is now, that's when I'm starting read up on agriculture or the hunter-gatherer diet.
Businesses evaluate decisions based on whether the rate of return is greater than the rate of finance. Eg., if you can borrow at 5% and use that money to make an investment that will provide risk-adjusted returns of 15%, then it always makes sense to borrow that money and make that investment. Doing so will always make your financial position better, regardless of the level of debt you are carrying.
Of course opportunity costs must also be taken into account: if you have cash in hand which you are are servicing debt at 15%, and have an opportunity to make an investment that returns 10%, then making that investment will worsen your financial situation; you should pay down the debt instead. Once again, this is true no matter how much debt you are carrying.
All public spending is an investment of sorts. Infrastructure, education, R&D, public health -- all of these produce measurable returns. Where those returns are greater than the cost of debt, your society will be better off for financing them by debt. Where those returns are lower than the cost of debt, it won't be. This sounds like an over-simplification, but isn't: accurately measuring those returns is no easy task even after the fact, much less predicting them beforehand. But that is what the public debate and decision-making process needs to be about, because that's what really matters. All this handwringing over imaginary debt ceilings and such has been nothing more than an incredibly destructive canard.
No, I think if we have learned one thing in the recent crisis it is that highly leveraged entities carry cumulative risk that is more than the sum of the parts. Also, the government is not one company of many. It is a monopoly that must be in a position to act countercyclically even when everyone else decides based on risk adjusted returns that it is best to sell everything, fire everyone and hide in a hole in the ground.
If the government is levered up like everyone else and therefore exposed to the same self reenforcing global dynamics when things go wrong, it will not be able to do its job in a crisis. The government must invest when no one else does and that means it has to invest less when everyone else does.
>All public spending is an investment of sorts
Not all of it, but even for the part that is, you have to ask whether that investment has a higher return than if the private sector made those investment decisions. That's obviously a highly ideological question. My own opinion is that it depends on the type of investment. I think we have good examples either way.
The voodoo thinking here is the assumption that you can actually calculate "risk-adjusted returns" outside of a casino.
To elaborate a little bit: A monetarily sovereign government really only needs higher tax revenue to stave off demand-driven inflation. But in the case of demand-driven inflation, something has to be done anyway due to real constraints.
Now you might ask whether austerity now could help future real constraints in any way. The answer is typically no: austerity means that less is consumed today, but at the cost of less production today. Austerity does not cause stockpiles of real resources to be built for the future.
If you actually wanted to build real resources for the future (and such a plan would be dubious at best, because predicting future needs is tricky, especially in the face of changing technology), you would actually want to do the opposite of austerity: you would want to spend more now, in order to buy the real resources that are stored away in the stockpile.
It is only these real considerations that matter for a monetarily sovereign country. Monetary constraints only matter for countries that are not sovereign, e.g. the various members of the Euro area.
The members of the Eurozone taken together have the same sovereignty over monetary policy as any other country. But that's beside the point.
The point is that a sovereign country with a central bank can print its own money, but that doesn't mean it can borrow in its own currency. If that country keeps printing tons of money inflating away the value of its debt and running a current account deficit on top of it will not be able to borrow in its own currency under its own laws for long.
That's where monetary constraints become very real constraints, because the country loses its ability to import stuff it doesn't produce.
You are right of course, but they can't get their shit together.
> The point is that a sovereign country with a central bank can print its own money, but that doesn't mean it can borrow in its own currency.
This is getting into a bit wonky details, but the bottom line is that your concerns are misplaced. First of all, a monetarily sovereign government doesn't have to borrow in the first place. The only reason that they "borrow" is to provide a safe interest earning asset for the financial sector to play with, and so that the central bank can effectively raise the interest rate without paying interest itself - and wouldn't that cause interesting questions by the public, if suddenly raising interest rates would cost the central bank money!
Second, at the end of the day when the government runs a deficit, banks have a choice between keeping surplus reserves at the central bank or buying government bonds. As long as the interest rate paid on government bonds is higher than that on reserves, banks will buy government bonds.
So there are no monetary constraints.
What you should be concerned about, if anything at all, is the exchange rate to other currencies. Clearly, most normal countries see their exchange rate fall if they run a current account deficit for too long (the US is an interesting but explainable exception to that rule).
This makes imports more expensive. On the other hand, it makes your exports cheaper for foreigners, which is a boost for domestic industry. So in the end, the economy actually benefits.
For starters there will always be some unemployment due to natural turnover: companies sometimes have to reduce their workforce and not every hire is a success for either the company or the employee. People need time to find the next job and companies need time to fill the position. This is often called the natural rate of unemployment.
However it is much more than that. Suppose the government could just spend lots more. What does it spend on? Or does it just hire every unemployed person? Are these permanent government jobs? What do they do? What are the long term effects?
Sadly I am not aware of any country that has managed to solve unemployment (except perhaps some totalitarian regimes like the former USSR and these were not sustainable solutions). You would think that is it was just a matter of spending as much as you want that this solution wold have been found long ago.
You are right that there will always be some unemployed as people need to find the next job after a surprising layoff. However, this is known as frictional unemployment, and can basically not be more than 2%. In practice, you'd expect it to be well below 1% in an otherwise well-functioning labor market, though I will admit that it depends on the exact institutions and laws surrounding labor.
What economists mean when they say "natural" unemployment is something else entirely. It refers to the (contested) idea that there is some "natural" rate of unemployment that the economy "wants" to achieve, in the sense that you will supposedly see some unintended negative side-effects if you use policy (such as classical demand policies) to push unemployment below that level. This unintended negative side-effect is typically said to be inflation.
There is some truth to this idea; the criticism is mostly in how one responds to it. There is truth to this idea because low unemployment increases the wage bargaining power of labor, which may result in higher inflation via the wage-price cycle.
However, the standard reaction to this is disappointing: Central banks purposefully generate unemployment to keep inflation low, making unemployment a macro-level problem, while the rest of policy (and public opinion) acts as if unemployment were the fault of the individual. This is clearly schizophrenic behavior.
The more intelligent response is to say that infinite demand for labor should be created at a fixed wage. This eliminates unemployment without enabling the wage-price cycle. This idea isn't exactly new, but it is not yet widely known, even though its supporters come from a surprisingly wide range of the political spectrum (the supporters disagree on the how of the implementation details; the main search keyword is "Job Guarantee", though I have also seen some superficially quite different proposals such as this one: http://www.morganwarstler.com/post/44789487956/guaranteed-in...).
Why is it not widely known? I believe it is a combination of (a) efforts to make this idea known outside of small academic circles are relatively recent, and (b) while individuals clearly benefit, there are no truly powerful individuals or social institutions that clearly benefit, hence the advocacy is not as well-organized as e.g. Austrian propaganda.
I wish nobody was unemployed. Well not really - I don't want an employer - a boss. You should be able to do what you want.
Milton Friedman was a very productive guy. Besides coining "natural rate of unemployment" he also invented the "basic income" (aka"negative income tax") many years ago. Great idea!
Once everyone has a sufficiently decent job, workers will have have enormous bargaining power, because they do not fear losing their jobs. Imagine how negotiations between bosses and workers would go. The ability to openly disrespect the boss, and the clearer possibility to transcend boss rule.
Absent other methods of control (like the USSR used, as you point out), capitalism would risk overthrow; that is, replaced by another system, with different defining institutions.
Needless to say, this poses a problem for policymakers, whose success depends on their ability to serve the wealthy elites who finance their campaigns and dominate government. So they must pursue economic policies which lead to sufficiently high unemployment (often sacrificing growth too; obviously less people are making stuff); or at least fragile employment, like in the service industry.
We always need empirical evidence. For your example, no, we don't know that, e.g. when the debt is monetized by the central bank. A bias towards sovereign debt elimination may be more dangerous than a bias towards sovereign debt accumulation - empirical evidence, not intuition, is how we validate the models that guide our trade-offs.
[Edit] And about your counter example: We do know that sovereign debt accumulation will eventually become impossible, so it's not relevant whether or not it would be beneficial. Once domestic lenders (who can be forced to lend) are exhausted, the government will have to borrow from foreigners in foreign currency under foreign law. So debt accumulation is only possible as long as foreigners are willing to lend.
The US doesn't issue sovereign debt AFAIK, and you cannot just print more money to repay sovereign debt, that's the whole point of it. (Sovereign debt by definition is issued in a foreign currency.)
But in the short term it's tragic for most people. Interest rates through the roof. Inadequate incomes. Etc.
Or to borrow a meme, "periods of high inflation have been great for the middle class" said nobody ever.
I don't really see much value in someone's axiomatic understanding of all of economics premised on the belief that they are smarter than people who study economics (even if they are; probably they are!). I'd much prefer to hear from someone who is less smart, but who admits the subject is too complex for them to fully understand and who can be bothered to go out and actually attempt to measure something (rather than telling me what it must be).
I guess I'm saying I think I can learn more from an honest person than a smart one. Now I'm questioning why I am wasting my time reading hacker news again.
EJMR is the closest thing to HN for economists, and it's trash.
The problem isn't that households can't "print currency" (in a sense they can) but that their debts aren't denominated in the currency they can print. Thus, the US government is in a relatively unique position that, for example, Cyprus and Greece do not enjoy.
A theoretical observation borne out quite well by the observed market characteristics of federal debt (e.g., the federal governments cost of borrowing.)
Also, if a household's interest payments are rising faster than its income then it will not be able to invest, say, in the education of the kids. So if you count the kids as part of that household over their lifetime, annual raises will indeed be smaller because better educated folks get bigger raises.
The bigger point is that debt is often the lubricant of growth. E.g. we're FAR better off borrowing money to educate our kids than saving money and raising kids with no knowledge or skills.
Tell that to the people who are underwater on their mortgages and are therefore severely handicapped financially because it's punitively expensive for them to move to find a new job if they become unemployed.
When I was living in the US in 2009 I was laid off as a part of a company wide restructuring caused by the recession. Because I rented I was able to relocate to a new job in 6 weeks. Colleagues who were underwater on their mortgages and therefore had to find a new job within commuting distance of their house took much longer to find new jobs.
And yet ...
I have to ask: If not now, when? If we can convince ourselves today that we can keep putting off the eventual cutbacks until tomorrow, as we have been for ages, how will next time be any different? If we can't justify cutbacks when the outlook is grim, how will we be able to when people are optimistic instead?
If not now, when? If not our generation, which? If the current state does not move us to make the hard calls, then what state would so move us?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/how-much-...
This is one thing an overstretched fiat currency has strikingly in common with Ponzi schemes.
At essence of any Ponzi scheme lies debt that inherently can not be repaid, and public disclosure of that acts as tipping point.
When interest rates on bonds remain at or below the rate of GDP growth, this is not an issue. For the U.S. (and other countries which issue floating-rate non-convertible currencies) interest rates on bonds are a policy variable of the central bank.
I think it's a good-faith concern. As much as I believe in data, the ability of the US to borrow cheaply enough to finance deficit spending is entirely up to the whims of investors. People are fickle. If the shit hits the fan and investors lose confidence in the USA for whatever reason, the deficit spending we currently rely on could become many times more expensive, and unsustainable.
EDIT: Downvotes? I doubt most people are even aware of this 90% number, but everyone knows about Greece. If you ask an average tea partier, I am willing to bet they are more concerned about Greece than exceeding 90% debt/GDP. If this is nonsense, refute it (I'd like to hear, and believe, that refutation).
To pay back its debt all the US government needs is dollars, and hey, look, the US government controls the supply of dollars.
To pay back its debt, the Greek government needs euros, and, oh, the ECB controls the supply of euros. Oops.
If you say the US can't print money because it will cause inflation - well, in the current climate you'd still be wrong, but let's address one issue at a time. The bottom line is that the US and Greece are fundamentally different, and comparisons between them are simply wrong.
So do I, but I also think it's wrong. As for the inflation concern, Weimar Germany was the loser of a highly economically destructive war on awful armistice terms. Even with the long and arguably inconclusive wars the US has been involved in over the last decade, its position as the #1 world power isn't really in question.
1. Interest payments typically do not replace other government spending. This is simply not how politics works: Politicians, at least at the highest level of government, typically do not look at the budget in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how much should be spent.
2. From the perspective of the macroeconomy, interest payments are a zero-sum game. The money goes to other actors in the economy who spend it.
3. Government is always able to spend the money on programs in addition to interest payment. After all, the government runs the monetary system (I realize that this is hard to grok because it is so different from our own, private, experience with how money works, but the difference is significant.)
1. So when NASAs budget gets cut, it's not because there's not enough money available?
2. Other actors in the economy who spend it on what?? How is that supposed to be equal in economic growth to spending it directly on investment?
3. Similar to #1. If government is always able to spend money on programs in addition to interest payments, then why are programs ever cut? And why then would debt ever be a concern? You make it seem as though debt is completely irrelevant.
It's easy to see how slow growth can increase debt: expenses grow through inefficiency, inflation, or whatever, but revenue fails to keep up. So we get low growth driving up debt. I can buy that.
If you have a big mortgage to pay off, will that slow down your salary increases? How? Why? You may lament the fact your salary goes to paying interest on your mortgage, but if anything you're more motivated to increase your salary (the proportional benefits from raises are greater!)
Government debt slows growth because you have to pay it back. The currency (you savings/income) may end up being devalued, or your taxes may have to go up.
In many cases, taking debt increases growth.
Maybe you took convertible debt or a loan to fund your startup? I don't imagine you told investors or bankers that taking on debt would slow the growth of your company. Did your 10-slide pitch deck show upward growth because you intend to stop growing as soon as they fund you? Why would investors lend you money if they knew your growth would slow down as soon as they did it?
Now, consider government. What happens when your community outgrows its roads? Do new businesses continue opening in that area? Do well-paid executives and engineers move to a city with lousy, outdated schools, poor telephone service, and minimal broadband Internet service?
Businesses use limited amounts of debt to fuel growth because they have a justifiable case that shows that the servicing of the debt is less than the returns on the investments made with the debt.
Often, businesses are wrong about whether or not their "justifiable case" is true. When wrong, their debt may just cut into the other assets on their balance sheet. Perhaps creditors will allow them to refinance so that their debt servicing is below their investment. Perhaps they'll go bankrupt. Perhaps they'll close their doors.
The US government 1. Has a really crappy track record of finding a return for its investments. 2. Will cause much more world disruption if it has guessed wrong on the whole "returns on investment vs debt servicing" equation.
Finally, businesses do not borrow money without limits. Their borrowing of money is based upon the amount of credit that outside parties give them. Given the US Government's downgrade in its rated ability to service its debt, shouldn't we be concerned that we're overextending ourselves?
Interest rates are down worldwide and has more to do with inflation and "the savings glut". They say nothing particularly positive about the US Government's credit worthiness.
The reason interest rates were low after Congress nearly defaulted on their debts is because federal bonds were considered a safer risk/reward than the markets. Wall Street trusted our treasury to pay its interest this last year more than they trusted blue chips to both hold their value and pay dividends with an unstable recovery. They were even holding onto T-bills while losing to inflation at times.
I question this premise, which seems to have become an article of faith with a lot of people. Could you explain what you base this view on?
- I mean, we just had a Depression because of government's involvement in housing pricing and lending.
- Public Education. Ever increasing money spent, never increasing results.
- Student Loans and Higher Education pricing is the next disaster that they have brewed by getting involved.
- Healthcare, as bad as it was with the mess of state regulations it had on it is becoming astoundingly worse with Obamacare.
- Social Security, Medicare, etc. are all financial disasters that have created huge obligations that we will be unable to pay.
- Airport security has done nothing to make us safer since the TSA, but there it is. A huge behemoth that makes travel painful.
[edit: hit post too soon]
We are 5 years into massive deficit, and massive debt, how much better are the schools? Execs and engineers are migrating back to Detroit now? The biggest problem is that for all that debt, there is very little to show for it.
The core problems is if the government taxes and extra $1000 dollars away from you that you would have used to grow your business, then spends it on debt service, or war, or something wasteful, that will slow growth.
It's just not this simple. It never is. That's why these arguments about debt and economy keep breaking down.
There is a case to be made that in 2008-2009, a big, debt financed, short term stimulus could have been helpful. But when that metastasizes into long term spending that doesn't look like it is going anywhere soon, and doesn't seem to be accomplishing anything, then it is worthwhile to sound the alarm.
Taxes are mostly outside of government control, so more spending implies more debt. Reducing debt implies reducing spending, and therefore less loss.
You're right that it's not the debt itself (or even the spending) that matters, but it's a good enough proxy.
When the data doesn't fit the model, it doesn't matter how pretty the model is, the model is wrong.
The right way to answer these questions is to say "The data contradicts my intuitions. How could my intuitions be wrong?"
See: http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Busi...
Example: 30 billion, at say, 2% interest per year (which a government could easily get, and the US can currently do much better then) is only 600 million interest repayments. And remember, this is before accounting for inflation, since the loan can be repaid with much cheaper dollars in the future (i.e. inflation usually sits at around 2%, and a government can tweak that as needed).
US debt servicing currently compromises about 7% of the annual budget. So there's no imminent risk that interest payments couldn't be paid for out of general revenue.
Even if the US really needed 600 million per year of some service, it would _still_ make more sense to take out the 30 billion loan, plough 28.8 billion into infrastructure or other investments, then spend 600 million on those services, 600 million on financing the interest, and repay the entire thing with simultaneously cheaper dollars in the future _and_ the new revenue they've generated from growth.
The only _real_ danger, is the risk you may have to run a larger fraction of your annual revenue into debt servicing if you can't refinance. But you can put money aside to account offset that contingency, and still borrow.
Also, inflation concerns (by reasonable people) only occur when the economy overheating. An overheating economy automatically reduces the government deficit via increased tax flows and reduced social security spending.
My mental model is that if inflation is 2%, the nominal interest rates are 2% higher than the real interest rate. How much does inflation affect the real interest rate?
The average interest rate over the past 50 years has been something like 5% [citation needed on my own number]. If we hit that, we will very quickly need to pay more money, and a lot of that old debt rolls over each year.
The US does not have a debt problem in 2013; as has been said, we can borrow at effectively zero. The US might very well have a big debt problem in 2018 or 2023.
If your government owes IOU's that it can print itself (fiat currency), it can never default on those IOU's.
If your government owes IOU's printed by another government or sovereign body, then it can most certainly run out of them and must buy them at market rates.
People like to repeat this as if it's somehow insightful and helpful to the discussion, but it's vacuous. Yes, you can always just print away debts denominated in a currency you control. That says nothing about how much you fuck up the economy by doing so. That's why some countries that could print their way out of debt (Russia '98) default anyway, because even a default might not be as bad as (the risk of) triggering complete collapse of the currency.
The way to be fiscally responsible with your currency is to print enough so that everyone has a job, but so much that you're overrunning your output capacity and increasing inflation. Keep interest rates on bonds (if you choose to issue them) lower than your GDP growth (and since you're the monopoly issuer of your currency, you have control over interest rates) and you won't have issues with expanding debt % [1].
The first response to this is usually "well, Greece" or "well, Zimbabwe". The crucial difference in those countries was that what they owed was not their own currency, but foreign currencies.
It says a great deal about the possible effects of deficit spending.
If you owe a foreign currency and have a catastrophic decrease in output, you're going to have problems.
If your debts are denominated in your own currency and have stable output, then increasing net financial assets to the private sector can prop up aggregate demand to keep the economy operating at full employment.
Hence my point, to which reiterating how cool it is to print your way out of debt is non-responsive.
I'd go further. Lets lay down the gauntlet here and proclaim: there is no long term deficit problem in the USA.
Too bad this can't be used more publicly in the political arena, since if anyone so much as mentions the economic theory people will be like "Reindeer-Stroganoff what?"
"Fully two-thirds of the national debt is owed to the U.S. government, American investors and future retirees, through the Social Security Trust Fund and pension plans for civil service workers and military personnel. China, it turns out, holds less than 8 percent of the money our government has borrowed over the years."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/09/04/who-do-owe-most-t...
These two sentences do not say the same thing. There is evidence that debt results in slower economic growth. There is not evidence that it negatively impacts growth, to with that it results in economic shrinkage. I'm with your general sentiment but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater in your enthusiasm.
What this means is, instead of slashing budgets in a recession because you think debt slows growth, instead invest in a recession, because the alternative is no benefit to growth plus putting more people out of work.
Moreover, government spending doesn't vanish into a blackhole. If I tax a dollar from you, and then build a highway or launch a GPS satellite or educate a child, I not only put your money back into the economy, I also left lasting changes that improve efficiency.
Oh my goodness, no. That's the least of it. They took all Commonwealth countries, found the periods where they had over 90% debt-to-GDP ratio, and EQUAL WEIGHTED them regardless of length or country.
I won't do a better job of explaining this than the article: "U.K. has 19 years (1946-1964) above 90 percent debt-to-GDP with an average 2.4 percent growth rate. New Zealand has one year in their sample above 90 percent debt-to-GDP with a growth rate of -7.6. These two numbers, 2.4 and -7.6 percent, are given equal weight in the final calculation, as they average the countries equally."
Wow.
They also subjectively ignored the post-WW2 period for most countries; coincidentally when countries had high debt and grew like crazy.
I bet that if you started with the desired results in mind for a study like this, you could create a list of variables to try and pick the combination that maximizes your metric.
Then provide a post-hoc justification for each choice.
For example: * debt-to-gdp 80%, 85%, 90%, 95%
* Ignore years after ww2 (the war was an externality)
* Don't ignore years after ww2 (why would we? they're years.)
* Ignore years after ww2 for countries that got aid from US (removing an externality)
* Ignore years after ww2 for countries that did not get aid from US (most countries did, don't want to mix the sample)
* Ignore years after ww2 for countries that were in the European theater (removing an externality)
* Ignore years after ww2 for countries that were not in the European theater (not affected by war like rest of globe)
* Ignore years after any war (externality)
* Weigh by population of country at time of study (lazy way to account for size of industry)
* Weigh by population of country by year (better way to accounts for size of industry)
* Equal weight for all countries (easy to explain)
* For each country, take periods of high debt-to-gdp and compare against periods without high debt-to-gdp; then compare countries equally (easy to explain-ish)
* Take each period of consecutive years with a high debt-to-gdp ratio and call each period one sample point. Average these inequal-length points together and compare against all years of low debt-to-gdp (Come on! Nobody would believe-- oh no.)
> According to their C.V.s [2], it's been published in the May 2010 issue of the American Economic Review, which is a special non-reviewed "papers and proceedings" issue.
So I really don't know why anyone listened to this in the first place other than it furthered their pre-existing political agenda.
This is why any paper should be required to release:
- the raw data supporting it;
- the assumptions, exclusions and weightings made to produce the final data; and
- any code used for a model.
All of these issues are particularly problematic when it comes to climate science.
[1]: http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/no-90-percent-debt-thre...
This is news. "We can't replicate" a landmark study (yes, it was an intercontinental landmark study) is very different from "we have found the specific errors that make this study faulty".
Maybe because this seems to be standard for research publications.
http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#flaws-in-mainstream-science-a...
e: downvote with comments please
Or would it?
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mcintyre-grl...
Regardless of what side you come down on w.r.t. this particular issue (and I realize it's a sensitive one), the fact that global policy was influenced by a paper that used secret, buggy Fortran code to manipulate a data set is extremely concerning. This is not good science.
Publishing data and source code should be a requirement these days.
"The test in science is whether findings can be replicated using different data and methods. More than two dozen reconstructions, using various statistical methods and combinations of proxy records, have supported the broad consensus shown in the original 1998 hockey-stick graph"
Meanwhile, everyone proceeded as if it were fact.
We need to raise the bar of skepticism and with it the burden of proof. Show me your raw data. Show me your code for manipulating that data into the final result. I'm honestly surprised that publishing data + paper + a source code repository isn't required in order to be taken seriously these days.
"7) Basically then the MM05 criticism is simply about whether selected N. American tree rings should have been included, not that there was a mathematical flaw?
Yes."
"8) So does this all matter?
No."
1) big problems in the climate science community with regard to data and replicability (see climateaudit for more than you could ever want)
2) massive statistical problems with reconstructions. See Mcshane and Wyner 2011.
You should see how bad it is in my field of study - biomechanics. It's a pure black box. We have total cronyism, where one reviewer has disproportional power since he was the first to publish much of the modern stuff. Therefore, people will do anything to have him review their papers, and his papers are pushed through despite what many feel are seriously glaring errors in methodology and collection.
This is the walled garden crap that turns me off to "peer-reviewed research."
For a much fuzzier field like economics, where the line between knowledge and opinion is extremely blurry, this "bending over backwards" to show how you might be wrong should be applied 100x .
This is in part why I am a programmer now and why my Poli Sci degree is sitting in a drawer.
More traditional poli-sci is scientific in the sense of the social sciences, which has a fairly long history of epistemological debate I'm only vaguely familiar with. I think I would probably call it scientific in a certain sense, but maybe a different word is needed. I'd group it vaguely with disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics as areas with quite a bit of methodological diversity, but still a more empirical orientation than you find in the humanities. Part of the issue is that there is data, but how to interpret the data is complex ("there is no such thing as raw data"). Though for mostly institutional reasons there are some people who are more philosophers or historians who also happen to be in poli-sci departments.
The American politics professor had an academic pedigree and insisted that Political Science could and should be a hard science backed up by facts and numbers. In his papers you need statistics, studies, and graphs. He focused very much on the methodology of your research and how well you could back up your claims with solid evidence.
The theoretical professor appreciated hard facts but it was much more important to him that you had a well-reasoned argument, and as _delirium said, would much rather read a 10-page paper full of epistemological debate than one twice that filled with detailed Bayesian analysis.
The international politics professor didn't care because he had tenure.
It's pretty common in medical research.
If a conclusion is only provable with one specific data set, then it can hardly be considered a universal objective truth of nature.
By analogy: if I drop a hammer and tell you that gravitational acceleration is 9.8 meters per second squared, you don't need to come over to my house and borrow my hammer to test it.
Sharing data and code is helpful for error checking, as it was in this case.
I don't know about the particular stat the article is talking about, but they give plenty of data here.
Can anyone imagine Paul Ryan or Cameron/Osborne coming out and admitting their policies are based on nothing more than gut feelings unsupported by anything? What about the countless pundits who've spent years squawking about austerity? The notion is laughable.
Which is why I personally put more trust in the irrationality of markets and business over the irrationality of elected lawyers who gain power via rhetoric (and not production).
http://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conserv...
/sigh
I used to believe that if only we all just talked things out, we'd come to an agreement. No more.
Now I focus on better organizing. Rallying the troops.
I wonder what you'll conclude with that data.
austerity -> cuts to social programs -> more poor people with less resources -> labor market who will work cheaper
What a charitable perspective.
Many of these organizations rely on private data to support their policy decisions, or rely on private analysis from similar organizations. That's hard to criticize because at least some of it would cause serious harm to the folks who provided it, or enable high finance players to front run policy actions to huge profit.
But what to make of an insider like that refusing to release data that had no market risk or legal restrictions in place. It's not hard to imagine that his primary goal was support of an economic philosophy and would have been just as happy to publish a paper that claimed high debt/gdp rations promote growth.
It certainly makes me wonder if this kind of approach is part of the culture in some of these policy and international finance organizations. If the data relied on by the IMF/ECB/etc as they've effectively reformed governments and imposed major budget changes can't be made public, then you're highly reliant on them to be ethical and extremely diligent.
If there's any significant amount of philosophy trumping science in the european restructuring, one begins to wonder if some of the weaker euro members are still actual democracies.
Sadly, ponies are a finite resource until such time as the government figures out how to print more of them. Debt still has a multiplier less than 1 - far less, for large amounts of debt.
All this article means is the magic number where debt starts to cause deep hurting is somewhere above 90% of GDP.
edit: And this may be because I don't know where the money comes from to begin with. If I keep getting bigger and bigger loans and there's no way my income will allow me to pay these loands back in the foreseeable future, then won't everyone just cease doing business with me at some point? Does "debt" in a government context act differently, and if so, why?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USDebt.png
The US national debt during WWII was around 120% of GDP. In the years that followed, that ratio fell to below 40%. However, we didn't appreciably pay off our debts, the real dollar amount stayed a little over $2 trillion. We accomplished this feat, of course, by substantially increasing the GDP. It is easy to realize that it is fine for debt to continuously grow, so long as the GDP grows faster.
Also, the only president to entirely pay off the national debt, Andrew Jackson, triggered one of the deepest depressions in US history.
Both options sound good to me, in that if people manage to keep eating and living in houses and raising their children after this happens, we will have officially entered a post-scarcity economy.
Not any more. This is a career killer. I wouldn't be surprised to see them accepting posts with the American Enterprise Institute or Cato in short order.
EDIT: also, Barry Ritholtz is generally perceived as an honest broker on these things, and his commentary is here: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/04/did-reinhart-rogoff-scr...
There's always room for disagreement because economics is the dismal science (as one famous line put it, Harry Truman wanted to find a one-handed economist - so they wouldn't always answer "X could happen, on the other hand, Y could happen), and answers aren't as binary as they sometimes are in the hard sciences. I'm curious to see what Rogoff and Reinhart respond to this with.
Edit: thanks for the Ritholz piece - hadn't seen that. I certainly am not claiming that there's no mistake - I just want to see what the defendants in this have to say, so to speak.
I know economics can be considered on the transition from hard to soft sciences, and even within the field you have very soft-science schools like the Austrians to very quantitative approaches like 'freshwater'. But that doesn't seem to apply here. Maybe if they added caveats to their methodology it would have been different.
I'm also not dismissing Cato or AEP out of hand, but nobody can deny that they are partisan think tanks. Their primary purpose is to provide cover for policy proposals, not original research.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/reinhart_and_...
That being said, and paraphrasing Yglesias, that association/causation disclaimer from them is really weak sauce. I don't recall such protestations while the paper was a cause celebre.
Reducing the problem to a personal level, you borrow money to buy a good car which enables you to work a higher paying job. This scenario makes the case that debt causes growth. From a policy standpoint if you borrow money for long term infrastructure and growth opportunities you could easily see debt as a net positive.
OTOH, you run up your credit cards to buy a better TVs or to buy 'friends'. In this instance debt can only lead to eventual poverty and ruin.
Which type of spending do you think is happening more often at a federal level?
It's also sort of the heart of Keynesianism. The counterpoint is the more intuitive certainty that if times are tough, everyone should tighten their belts, including the government. That's sort of what drives the austerity efforts.
spinonthird has already pointed out the Paradox of Thrift. I would add that a lot of confusion surrounding this particular topic comes from the widespread inability to distinguish between real tough times and monetary tough times.
By monetary tough times I mean: bank collapses, loan defaults, low available income.
By real tough times I mean: lack of available resources, natural disasters destroying infrastructure.
In real tough times, it is true that everybody should tighten their belt. Typically, they are forced to do so via inflation, and if the government refuses to listen there will be hyperinflation.
In monetary tough times, tightening your belt personally is your only choice due to the constraints that you have. But it is exactly the wrong response for government to tighten its belt as well. Rather, government - especially monetarily sovereign government - should use its unique position in the economy to get the economy going again, to enable the real capacity available to be used.
Observe how a simple confusion of these scenarios can lead to incorrect predictions, similarly to how so many people predicted back in 2009 that raging hyperinflation should have happened by now. They were obviously wrong, and I posit that underlying their wrongness is the inability to properly distinguish between real and monetary phenomena.
Anti-keynesians (hayekians?) point this out regularly and like to say that the burden of proof is on the keynesians, which will of course be impossible for the keynesians to ever prove. So that's where they get their handhold on arguing against keynesian theory. (Note I'm only a hobbyist with this stuff so my explanations may be way off - this is just my own sense of it.)
Now, there's something to be said for sometimes accepting something that is not potentially provably false. I think Darwinian evolution is an example of something that is not a strictly technical theory, but there's been such a body of experimentation over the years that you pretty much have to accept it as fact anyway.
And there's work done in modern Causality about how to tease out causality from correlation in the absence of counterfactuals. I've been trying to struggle through a causality textbook by Judea Pearl but it's really weird advanced stuff.
On the other hand, if the deeper hold leads to a valuable public resource...
That's what investing capital is supposed to do, only it should be done with private funds and private risk. If the growth were likely to continue, capital would seek out those enterprises without debt-spending.
I can't find a more evenhanded and clear statement of the problem than his.
What's amazing to me is that no one, until the researchers spotlighted here, apparently thought to ask to see the data? Isn't this part of peer-review?
Things like this is why I love being part of the open-source community. People may brag about and diss each other's code performance to an unnecessary degree of hostility, but at least we can all check the code and run it for ourselves.
iirc, the paper wasn't published, let alone peer-reviewed. it was "discovered" and used as a justification by people who may or may not understand the deeper issues involved.
For example, perhaps the US and Euro governments wanted to justify some tough measures of fiscal restraint and increase public support, and they wanted to keep it from being delayed until collapse was impossible to avoid. (See, I'm not totally jaded. But I can think of plenty of worse scenarios too.)
The "flaws" seem to be too large (and some deliberate) to be unintentional, but maybe I give too much credit. I've just noticed too much misinformation being spread by those who should know better, and coincidentally seem to benefit the most from it. I'm suspending my judgement until I learn more, but anyone else have any insights?
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-rep...
and the paper (including the data and code files upon which the results are based!) is:
http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04dea...
Also, you can print money to increase supply, this is what the Asian miracle is all about after all. Too bad they didn't print money to increase demand...
concluding paragraph makes so much sense:
"More than five decades ago, Abba Lerner gave the answer to this question. If there are involuntarily unemployed (we would add underemployed) people it means the deficit is too low. The government should either cut taxes or increase spending. It is certainly debatable which one is a better policy, but that’s beyond the scope of this paper. When is the deficit too large? When it’s over 3%, 7%, 10%? Again, there is no magic number and anyone who comes up with a universal number simply misunderstands the modern monetary regime and macroeconomics. In opposition to magic, Lerner proposed “functional finance”—the notion that the federal government’s budgetary outcome is of no consequence by itself, but rather, what is important is the economic effects of government spending and taxing. When total spending in the economy, including government spending, is more than what the economy is able to produce when employed at full capacity, the government should either lower its spending or raise taxes. A failure to do so will lead to inflation. So inflation is the true limit to government spending not lack of financing. Government debt is merely the result of government deficit and hence the same applies to debt as well."
Did real economists always consider these results provisional/dubious/bogus and the fact that they were used as the basis of policy is to the shame of our policy makers and press, or is the field of economics so messed up that research based on schoolboy errors can become the accepted view within the field?
Reinhart and Rogoff may reach exactly the opposite conclusion, given the embarrassing publicity. For me this is an illustration of why publishing just your conclusions without data (or code, or whatever details are germane to your field) is so common.
That conclusion is quite a jump from Reinhart-Rogoff is flawed.
0-30 debt/GDP, 4.2% growth; 30-60, 3.1 %; 60-90, 3.2%,; 90-120, 2.4% and over 120, 1.6%
Nobody disputes the idea that more debt can result in slower growth. But there's a huge difference between saying that growth with high debt levels has historically been about 2.2% (compared to a more desirable 3%+ with lower debt) and saying that high-debt-growth has been -0.1%. That's an error of 220% in the wrong direction.
Tangentially related: I've been thinking recently about how hard it would be to teach a real programming language to Excel users. They would already have some grasp of functions, arrays, and variables. I think the analogues might have some pedagogical value.
But we're talking here about some very bright people accustomed basically hacking the one thing they know to get results. It's a subset of "Excel users" generally.
It's my handle, at gmail.com
A not-insignificant part of my previous job was training Excel users to use non-Excel reporting and analysis tools. I believe I can say honestly say that 100% of them had no idea of arrays or variables, and only about a third of them even used the built-in Excel functions.
You are very optimistic here... Very optimistic. My guess is that 90% of excel users are at a maximum using the sorting button.
1) You can generally count on built-in formulas to be correct, which might have to be recreated in a different language;
2) Excel programs have a highly stylized control flow that's so simple that you don't even really have to explicitly consider it--you just look at the data flow and assume the engine gets the control flow right;
3) Excel has built in visual aids to help you catch off-by-one errors and the like, as well as charting capabilities to help you see if intermediate variables are behaving the way they ought to behave.
And have you ever seen say a Matlab script written by a researcher? Researchers outside CS (and many researchers inside CS) write terrible code, because that's not their job. I'd much rather debug an Excel file written by an economist than a Matlab program.
You can generally count on built-in formulas to be correct, which might have to be recreated in a different language;*
Most of the errors where inherited from very early versions of Excel. Instead of fixing the formula, they would just replicate the bug to keep everything consistent.
I'm straining to remember the specific examples (there were many), but it's been quite a few years since I was around that stuff.
http://blog.meteorit.co.uk/2007/10/02/excel-2007-bug-shows-w...
one example from the post: 425 * 154.2 was displayed as 100,000 and treated as 100000 for some calculations but not others.
I remember older versions of Excel having similar (but not exactly the same) problems in basic mathematical operations too, but can't remember exactly what they were.
This is wishful thinking at best. Excel numerics have all sorts of undocumented corner cases that attempt to make answers that “look right” instead of a predictable and documented numerics model.
It’s been years since I’ve used Excel, but for example, you can construct values A and B that satisfy any subset of the the following conditions: (1) A == B is true (2) A - B is zero (3) A and B display the same value under any formatting.
These tiny differences usually don’t matter, but eventually someone tries to do an unstable computation, and the tiny differences are blown up into great big differences.
Think about all the accounting and financial decisions that is reviewed in excel. They are vitally important to get correct.
(http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm)
There are lots of errors in accounting and financial spreadsheets. It's vitally important that traders enter the correct numbers when making trades, but 'fat finger errors' happen pretty often.
Ray Panko has a lot of useful research about spreadsheets. Part of the problems he identifies are difficulties in auditing and finding errors.
[1] (http://www.eusprig.org/)
[2] (http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/ssr/) My internet is flaky, and none of the links I find work.