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I went to talk to someone who did not hire me over the 200 plus competition over the years and he questioned my CV which did not move from appointment to appointment. I took it so calmly that I came home with 2 bags of 50% off frenemy bread. Then my horoscope for today (thanks Australia) instead of talking about the future is about the health dangers of refined foods - I know that. Then the blogosphere is full of this Reinhart and Rogoff story (See Progressive Econ blog below). Their research was used as a prop for austerity and high unemployment. Now someone (not the econ blogger that I have spent so much time reading), has gotten their data and found what would be called fraud if the authors were lesser known, but is instead being called error by under paid grad students. Rogoff won the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics which comes with more money than I have earned in years. Beating Back the Ghosts: Be Gone Appeals to Reinhart and Rogoff Authority. Welcome the Triumph of Reason. Posted by Arun DuBois under debt, deficits, fiscal policy. April 16th, 2013 Comments: none They’ve haunted me. Incessantly. The ghosts of Reinhart and Rogoff. Their research here, there, everywhere. Bank of Canada speeches? Yes. Finance Department talking points? Check. House of Commons debates? Yup. Globe editorials? Ditto. Discussions with fellow progressives? Sadly, yes. Results? Arguments conjured in their name. Reason decapitated. Modern Monetary Theorists (MMT) banished to the netherworld of cranks. But we told you so. We told you so**: Randy Wray, writing a little more than a year ago, called them out, saying: “One hopes that the database they have assembled might provide more detail. We have tried contacting both authors to access the database, but so far with no response“ Bill Mitchell: pointing to the inconvenient truth of the underlying analysis and its emphasis on external (not domestic) debt. And then the countless exaggerations that followed by the authors and their propagandists. Me, in private, countless times running through the arguments to no avail. Authority wins. Fear of trespassing on the sacred convention of balanced budgets wins. Fear of the narrative wins. For a nice roundup of what I speak, cryptically because I dare not tempt the gods, please check out the following. Hopefully, this will suffice for the exorcism: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/holy-coding-error-batman/ http://www.nextnewdeal.net/rortybomb/researchers-finally-replicated-reinhart-rogoff-and-there-are-serious-problems http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf Arun ** I use we in the royal we sense not to mean me but the (far far far) more prolific MMT writers who I greatly admire.