alexseanchai | (no subject)

(no subject)

If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

More worrisome is that the researchers excluded data that contradicts their hypothesis (that having national debt greater than 90% of GDP slows the economy) and gave heavier weighting to data that better supports it, but seriously? We wrecked the Greek economy and we're trying to wreck the UK and US economies based on an Excel error?

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Well, there was the one time the NYSE suffered the equivalent of a kernel panic when someone typed in an order for a billion shares instead of a million, and all the automated agents responded immediately...

More seriously, the methodology looks very suspect with all of that exclusion and weird weighting.

Suspect, hell, I'm inclining towards the belief that this is outright fraud.

Fraud would be an accurate description at this point. As would calling anyone whoop used this data to advance their agenda charlatans, fraud, and monsters.

So basically it's a case of academic fraud that supports a politcal agenda.

... I'm not even shocked. Appalled, but not shocked.

Yeah, exactly.

It's been happening since at least the early 80s with Reaganomics. It's all fraud, it's all been proven to be the opposite of what actually works historically. But they put ideology over reality and so they get funding. You can't buy all the economists and historians by a long shot, but you can buy a few, and those few get quoted as experts in the newspapers and magazines you've bought, no matter how poorly they're regarded by everyone else in their field.

Yes, let's keep pointing to the study made of smoke and mirrors instead of, oh, I don't know, looking at how well austerity is ACTUALLY working in Europe. I hope Angela Merkel is reading that report. Ugh. Seriously. I used to be a Republican. Now nothing short of a complete radical overhaul of the party would get me to vote for any Republican ever again. Even the economic stuff I used to believe in is a fraud.

I think austerity is working exactly as intended. They might need to sell the whole 'concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of the exceedingly few' thing a bit better, if they want to keep it going without getting booted out of office (or shot, because the longer this goes on the less I think 'first against the wall when the revolution comes' is a joke), but I think it's working as intended.

Yes, this. The goal is not something that makes everyone's lives better; the goal is to service an ideology in which the state doesn't do much because it can't do much. They don't care about the way the world actually is. It's what happens when you put principles before people (as Cordelia Vorkosigan would say).

*nods*

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