On the day that UK unemployment jumped 70,000 and one of the architects of that steady stream of unemployment and minimum wage slavery was buried, something else was buried too...
... the revelation that the academic paper that all austerity policies are based on - "Growth in a Time of Debt" by Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart - is based on a fallacious and malicious analysis of the data.
Carmen Reinhart Contemplating The Children She Will Eat For Breakfast
"Sloppy statistics" according to Robert Harding in Wednesday's Financial Times.
Rogoff and Reinhart found that growth falls to a mean average of minus 0.1 per cent when public debt is greater than 90% of output.
But researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst find a figure of plus 2.2% when repeating the analysis.
"Coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics led to serious errors that inaccurately represent the data between public debt and GDP growth."
"Unsupportable statistical techniques..."
Financial Times: "The Amherst researchers said that Ms Reinhart and Mr Rogoff had made an error in their spreadsheet, missed several years of data and then averaged their results in a way that put unusual weight on short episodes in particular countries."
Robert Pollin and Michael Ash: "The main policy plank is riddled with faults."
The original paper and the arbitrary nature both of the 90% threshold and the general manner that economic/econometric "science" is addressed show the ludicrous nature of depending on the dismal science to produce anything other than dismal science.
Although the pseudo-case for austerity doesn't solely depend on Rogoff and Reinhart, other supportive sources have also recently been discredited.
And Rogoff and Reinhart produced their propaganda in 2010...
... why has it taken three years for anyone to check the figures when global economic policy has been based on the austerity that the paper proposes?
We're either being run by entirely incompetent fools or by malicious psychopaths.
Incompetent Fool Or Malicious Psychopath? Too Busy Selling His Cheshire Estate Two Days Before High Speed Rail Route Announced To Notice That The "Intellectual" Authority Underpinning His Class War Perversion Was Of No Merit
A former professor of mine, Neville Topham, told me about a high level consultancy document that he had written showing that house prices increase more than average for properties directly under the flight paths at Heathrow Airport.
"You can show anything with data in economics" was the justification for his fee.
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