Comments for It Would Be Helpful if Rogoff and Reinhart Made Their Data Available at http://www.cepr.net , comment 1 to 3 out of 3 comments http://www.cepr.net Thu, 23 May 2013 13:09:54 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/not-following-professional-ethics-matters-also#comment-1322 I just looked at the paper, and it claims the data can be found in their financial crises book. I don't have a copy, but if anyone else does, it would be interesting to find out if the data is really there. - Walt Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:17:54 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/not-following-professional-ethics-matters-also#comment-1296 http://www.scribd.com/doc/25734670/Reinhart-Rogoff-Growth-in-a-Time-of-Debt Who asked for what data? - AndrewDover Sun, 04 Jul 2010 03:53:35 +0100 http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/not-following-professional-ethics-matters-also#comment-1295 Quotes from the NYT article on Reinhart and Rogoff: [quote]In digging through old records and piecing together a vast puzzle of disconnected data points, her (Reinhart) ultimate goal, in that paper and others, has always been “to see the forest,” she says, “and explain it.” ... “You know, everything is simple when it’s clearly explained,” she contends. “It’s like with Sherlock Holmes. He goes through this incredible deductive process from Point A to Point B, and by the time he explains everything, it makes so much sense that it sounds obvious and simple. It doesn’t sound clever anymore.”[/quote] 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 [i]deductive theory[/i] and debunks it. [quote]Given this (empirical data) backdrop, it’s perhaps not surprising that a book arguing that the crisis was a rerun, and not a wholly novel catastrophe ...[/quote] 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. [quote]But even in its quantitative perspective and breadth, the book still stands on the shoulders of an economic classic, “A Monetary History of the United States: 1867-1960,” written by another great male-and-female pair of economists, Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. “What Friedman and Schwartz did for the U.S. was heroic,” says Ms. Reinhart.[/quote] 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. [quote]Since that time (early '70s), he (Rogoff) says, “economists like to think that there is some physical, stable state of the world if they get the model right.” But, he adds, “there is really no such thing as a stable state for the economy.”[/quote] 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. - izzatzo Sun, 04 Jul 2010 03:13:33 +0100