Next New Deal

Negative growth to positive is a change in direction, no?

How is treating nineteen years of British data as having the same weight as one year of NZ data a "fairly standard weighting"? Britain is far larger in population on top of everything else.

"So what do Herndon-Ash-Pollin conclude? They find "the average real GDP growth rate for countries carrying a public debt-to-GDP ratio of over 90 percent is actually 2.2 percent, not -0.1 percent as [Reinhart-Rogoff claim]." [UPDATE: To clarify, they find 2.2 percent if they include all the years, weigh by number of years, and avoid the Excel error.] Going further into the data, they are unable to find a breakpoint where growth falls quickly and significantly."

2.2 vs -0.1 — you're only out by an order of magnitude.

As you say, weighting by number of years is also a problem. If you weighted the values by population or size of economy ("fairly standard weighting") I suspect the results would shift again but be biased in favor of more recent figures (economies and populations are bigger over time).

http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems

TL;DR -- none. Read the evidence.

This actually isn't news. Questions have already been raised as this paper was never peer reviewed [1] (Jan 2013), which states:

> 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-threshold-hasnt-been-proven

[2]: http://www.carmenreinhart.com/c.v./cv-in-pdf/

Interesting mainly because of the importance of a coding error, as further described here: http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems

"As Herndon-Ash-Pollin puts it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49...This spreadsheet error...is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category." Belgium, in particular, has 26 years with debt-to-GDP above 90 percent, with an average growth rate of 2.6 percent (though this is only counted as one total point due to the weighting above)."

Interesting point: "when we think about how technology interacts with labor market we think of substitution of labor with machinery. [...] What is neglected is that it complements us as well. Many activities require a mixture of things. it requires a mixture of information process and creativity, motor power and dexterity. if those things need to be done together if you make one cheaper and more productive, you increase the value of the other."

Transcribed here http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/one-where-larry-summers-demolished-robots-and-skills-arguments

This is my biggest gripe. There have been several well-publicised studies where calculations were in error.

88% Of excel spreadsheets have errors - I couldn't find the actual study after a quick googling.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/88-of-spreadsheets-have-errors-2013-04-17

Recent national debt study found to contain erroneous calculations;
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems