What The Austerity Paper’s Intellectual Collapse Tells Us About Modern Journalism

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/16/1875891/what-the-austerity-papers-intellectual-collapse-tells-us-about-modern-journalism/

Tuesday afternoon, Mike Konczal transformed the debate over austerity and growth by reporting new study finding that a paper by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that served as one of the principal intellectual justification for austerity turns out to be have been fatally flawed. Its conclusions, for example, were based in part on an elementary Excel coding error (Reinhart and Rogoff, for their part, aren’t conceding the game).

This error is obviously of immense economic and political importance; Matt Yglesias rightly calls it “literally the most influential article cited in public and policy debates about the importance of debt stabilization.” But the young controversy also says something interesting about the way that modern journalists do business, especially as arguments over academic papers becomes a bigger and bigger part of public debate, particularly over economics.

The Reinhart/Rogoff paper wasn’t just influential for self-described deficit hawks like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) or the Washington Post editorial page; it got serious play in an astonishing array of media outlets. Because Reinhart and Rogoff were eminent economists who had written a widely-praised history of financial crises, their work was generally treated very respectfully by the mainstream press, often invoked totemically as proof that the United States couldn’t cross the 90 percent debt-to-GDP “threshold” without dire consequences for growth.

But let’s be honest: most journalists had no real way of knowing whether or not Reinhart/Rogoff had actually provided *good* proof of the 90 percent theory. The reason economists tend to have PhDs is that economics is a difficult, technical profession; assessing the robustness of any individual finding requires a degree of econometric expertise, background knowledge, and free time that the vast majority of journalists simply don’t have. That goes double for the evaluation of disputes between leading economists. As Tim Harford, a seasoned economics journalist with an Oxford Master’s in the subject, put it when confronted with an early critique of Reinhart/Rogoff: “this is beyond my pay grade.”
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