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The NYT devoted a long story to touting the work of Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart on financial crises. At one point the article comments that:
"Although their book is studiously nonideological, and is more focused on patterns than on policy recommendations, it has become fodder for the highly charged debate over the recent growth in government debt."
Actually, much of the fodder for the public debate has been over a separate paper that claims that economies perform more poorly once their debt to GDP ratio exceeds 90 percent. Mr Rogoff and Ms. Reinhart have declined to adhere to standard ethics within the economics profession and have refused to share the data on which they base their conclusion with other researchers.
Later, the article asserts that:
"In the years before and during Mr. Rogoff’s tenure [as chief economist with the IMF], critics including the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz accused the I.M.F. of having a cold-hearted, doctrinaire approach to its work in poorer countries. Some of that criticism still clings to Mr. Rogoff. For his part, he contends that the I.M.F. did what it could for countries with intractable problems, and that the critics’ approaches would have made troubled economies even weaker."
Mr. Rogoff's critics did not just accuse him of being cold-hearted. During his tenure at the IMF, Argentina went from being an IMF poster child to being an outlaw when it defaulted on its debt in December of 2001. In the years prior to its default, the IMF consistently erred on the high side in its projections of growth for Argentina. In the years after it defaulted the IMF's projections consistently underestimated Argentina's growth by large amounts. It would be almost impossible to produce this pattern of errors if the IMF was not using political criteria in its growth projections for Argentina.
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This is called inductive reasoning over deductive reasoning. One could walk outside, look at the earth and declare it's flat, look at the sun and declare it's rotating around the earth, then declare it's so obvious and simple it doesn't sound clever anymore, like Teabaggers do. Sherlock Holmes comes along with a deductive theory and debunks it.
Keynes already said this, followed by Hyman Minksky's refinement of bubble theory. So empiricism is declared superior to theory except when it's not convenient, revealed in the inadvertent endorsement of a theory that says unstable business cycles are common, masked as irrefutable empirical data which has only one (theoretical) explanation. Theirs.
It was the reigning counter theory to Keynes at the time in explaining the Great Depression. It was a theory proposed in competition with another theory to explain observable "facts". It wasn't a list of irrefutable empirical facts on one side that debunked a theory on the other side.
This was just before Great Moderation period when economists came to believe severe business cycles had been conquered and Keynes was shelved onto the dust bin. Here Rogoff effectively says the same thing as economists like Krugman, Stiglitz and Baker and again, either endorses Keynes without realizing it, or implys at best that private market economies cannot be inherently stable despite correct applications of monetary policy a la theory by Friedman and Schwartz.
History and empirical data have no meaning without a theoretical framework. Why did the chicken cross the road? Why did Hitler invade Poland? Who cares. Data trumps theory every time. Just collect a huge amount of empirical data and let it speak for itself. After all, there's only one possible explanation when all the data is available.