Congratulations are due to Professor Boyce who’s book Economics, the Environment and Our Common Wealth was named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013 by Choice Magazine. Choice is widely read by academic librarians in the US.
The book is a collection of essays that combine modern political economy with environmental economics. The essays in the volume cover topics from housing and credit markets to agriculture and globalization. The core of Boyce’s argument revolves around the idea that a clean and safe environment is not a commodity to be allocated on the basis of purchasing power, nor a privilege to be allocated through political power, but rather a basic human right. Building upon this premise, James K. Boyce explores the many ways in which economics can be refashioned into an instrument for advancing human well-being and environmental health.
On April 15, UMass Amherst Economics Department Graduate Student Thomas Herndon and Professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin published a working paper titled, Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. In the paper the authors examine Reinhart and Rogoff’s research on the relationship between public debt and GDP growth for advanced economies in the post-World War II period. Reinhart and Rogoff argue that the rate of economic growth for these countries has consistently declined precipitously once the level of government debt exceeds 90 percent of the country’s GDP. In recent years, Reinhart and Rogoff’s results have been highly influential as support for austerity policies in both Europe and the United States.
Herndon, Ash and Pollin find that a series of data errors and unsupportable statistical techniques led to an inaccurate representation of the actual relationship between public debt levels and GDP growth. They find that when properly calculated, average GDP growth for advanced economies at public debt-to-GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt-to-GDP ratios are lower.
Almost immediately the Herndon, Ash, Pollin findings went viral with lots of social media buzz on Twitter and Facebook. The story has continued to garner extensive national and international coverage. Below is a list of media coverage since June 2013, including the Mother Jones cover story for September/October.
In January 2010, as the global economy was slowly beginning to claw its way out of the depths of the Great Recession, the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff published a short paper with a grim message: Too much debt kills economic growth. They had compiled a comprehensive database of debt episodes throughout the 20th century, and their data told an unmistakable story: Time and again, countries that rack up high debt levels have gone on to suffer years—sometimes decades—of stagnation.
As economics studies go, it was nothing short of a bombshell. As its conclusions were invoked from Washington to Brussels, tackling the recession suddenly became less important than tackling deficits. For the next three years, stimulus was out, austerity was in, and the protests of critics were all but buried amid the headlong rush to slash spending.
But then, on April 15 of this year, a trio of researchers at the University of Massachusetts published a paper that took a fresh look at Reinhart and Rogoff’s study. It turned out there was a problem: R&R had presented data from a list of 20 countries that filled lines 30 through 49 on a spreadsheet. But the formula that calculated the results relied on lines 30 through 44. Oops.
On its own, the spreadsheet error had only a modest effect on the paper’s conclusions, but the UMass team had other, weightier criticisms that taken together called R&R’s conclusions into serious question. Still, under ordinary circumstances the whole thing would have been little more than a dry academic debate.
But these were far from ordinary circumstances. Like a well-aimed snowball that sets off an avalanche, the UMass paper changed everything.
After UMass economics graduate student Thomas Herndon and professors Robert Pollin and Michael Ash blew the lid off of data errors in Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s “Growth in a Time of Debt,” professor Arindrajit Dube determined that high public debt was more likely after a period of slow economic growth than before a period of slow growth. This indicates that slow growth is the driver of increasing debt, not that high debt diminishes growth. Dylan Matthews of The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” recently cited Dube’s research (additionally he made a short mention of Herndon, Pollin and Ash):
And indeed, analyses after Reinhart and Rogoff’s confirmed that the causal arrow went from slow growth to high debt, not the other way around. Arindrajit Dube, an economist at UMass Amherst, found that high debt loads are better correlated with slow growth before the debt gets that large as opposed to after, indicating that it’s the slow growth causing the debt and not the other way around:
The left chart correlates debt-to-GDP ratios of a given year to the GDP growth rates of the next three years. If debt is causing slow growth, there should be a strong relationship. But except at the very low end, there isn’t. Meanwhile, the right chart correlates debt-to-GDP ratios of a given year to GDP growth rates of the previous three years. There’s a very strong relationship, indicating that slow growth causes high debt and not the other way around.
In the wake of the Herndon paper, The Washington Post profiled the UMass Amherst Department of Economics, providing a detailed history of the department’s growth and development over the last 40-plus years. Interviewed for the piece were Professors Richard Wolff, Gerald Epstein, Nancy Folbre, Arindrajit Dube and Robert Pollin.
It was surprising to learn last week that Harvard professors Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s argument for austerity is based in part on an Excel blooper. What’s not surprising is who found it out.
The rebuttal came in the form of a paper released by the Political Economy Research Institute, a group at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst with close ties to its economics department. Two of its authors, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, are UMass professors, and the other, Thomas Herndon, is a grad student in the department. No one who knows the UMass department was surprised they’d trained their considerable analytical firepower on Reinhart and Rogoff. Amherst has, over the past 40 years, developed a reputation as perhaps the single most important heterodox economics department in the country.
It wasn’t always that way. In the 1960s, it was a fairly mainstream department, with a moderately conservative inclination, according to emeritus professor and influential Marxist economist Richard D. Wolff. It employed Vernon Smith, a noted libertarian who shared the 2002 Nobel, from 1968 to 1972, and Hugo Sonnenschein, who would go on to be president of the University of Chicago, from 1970 to 1973.
That was when things started to change. The tipping point, Wolff says, was the denial of tenure for Michael Best, a popular, left-leaning junior professor. “He had a lot of student support, and because it was the 1960s students were given to protest,” Wolff recalls. That, and unrelated personality tensions with the administration, inspired the mainstreamers to start leaving. Read more…
A new study by UMass Amherst Department of Economics Graduate Student Thomas Herndon and Professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin refutes the Reinhart and Rogoff analysis that underpins austerity policy around the world; shows no relation between debt and lack of growth. Watch The Real News Network interview with Ash and Herndon.
Austerity after Reinhart and Rogoff
Robert Pollin and Michael Ash
In 2010, two Harvard economists published an academic paper that spoke to the world’s biggest policy question: should we cut public spending to control the deficit or use the state to rekindle economic growth? Growth in a Time of Debt by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff has served as an important intellectual bulwark in support of austerity policies in the US and Europe. It has been cited by politicians ranging from Paul Ryan, the US congressman, to George Osborne, the UK chancellor. But we have shown that several critical findings advanced in this paper are wrong. So do we need to rethink austerity economics more broadly?
Their research is best known for its result that, across a broad range of countries and periods, economic growth declines dramatically when a country’s level of public debt exceeds 90 per cent of gross domestic product. In their work with a sample of 20 advanced economies in the postwar period, they report that average annual GDP growth ranges between about 3 per cent and 4 per cent when the ratio of public debt to GDP is below 90 per cent. But it collapses to -0.1 per cent when the ratio rises above a 90 per cent threshold.
In a new working paper, co-authored with Thomas Herndon, we found that these results were based on data errors and unsupportable statistical techniques. For example, because of miscalculation and unconventional methods of averaging data, a one-year experience in New Zealand in 1951, during which economic growth was -7.6 per cent and the public debt level was high, ends up exerting a big influence on their overall findings.
When we performed accurate recalculations, we found that, when countries’ debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 90 per cent, average growth is 2.2 per cent, not -0.1 per cent. We also found that the relationship between growth and public debt varies widely over time and between countries.
So what does this mean? Consider a situation in which a country is approaching the threshold of a 90 per cent public debt-to-GDP ratio. It is not accurate to assume that these countries are reaching a danger point where growth is likely to decline precipitously.
Rather, our evidence shows that a country’s growth may be somewhat slower once it moves past the 90 per cent public level. But we cannot count on this being true under all, or even most, circumstances. Are we considering the US demobilisation after the second world war or New Zealand during a severe one-year recession? One needs to ask these and similar questions, including whether slow growth was the cause or consequence of higher public debt.
What of our present circumstances? Using the Reinhart/Rogoff data, we found that the average GDP growth rate for countries carrying public debt levels greater than 90 per cent of GDP was either comparable to or higher than those for countries whose debt ratios ranged between 30 per cent and 90 per cent.
Of course, one could say that these were special circumstances due to the 2007-2009 financial collapse and Great Recession. Yet that is exactly the point. When the US and Europe were hit by the financial crisis, and subsequent collapse of private wealth and spending, deficit-financed government spending was the most effective tool for injecting demand back into the economy. The increases in deficits and debt were indeed large in these years. But this was a consequence of the crisis and a policy tool for moving economies out of the recession. The debt was not the cause of the growth collapse.
The case for austerity has never relied entirely on Prof Reinhart and Prof Rogoff. But the other major claims made recently by austerity hawks have also not held up well. Austerity supporters circa 2009-2010 consistently argued, frequently in this newspaper, that the large US deficits would lead to dangerously high inflation and interest rates. Neither prediction came true. In fact, both inflation and interest rates on treasuries were at historic lows in the four years, 2009-2012, during which deficits were at their peak.
It is also untrue to say that the large deficits have created an unsustainable burden on the US public finances. In fact, since 2009, the US government’s interest payments on debt have been at historically low levels, not historic highs, despite the government’s rising level of indebtedness. This is precisely because the US Treasury has been able to borrow at low rates throughout these high deficit years.
We are not suggesting that governments should borrow and spend profligately. But judicious deficit spending remains the single most effective tool we have to fight against mass unemployment caused by
severe recessions. Recent research by Prof Reinhart and Prof Rogoff, along with all related arguments by austerity proponents, does nothing to contradict this fundamental point.
The writers are professors of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
On April 15, UMass Amherst Economics Department Graduate Student Thomas Herndon and Professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin published a working paper titled, Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff. In the paper the authors examine Reinhart and Rogoff’s research on the relationship between public debt and GDP growth for advanced economies in the post-World War II period. Reinhart and Rogoff argue that the rate of economic growth for these countries has consistently declined precipitously once the level of government debt exceeds 90 percent of the country’s GDP. In recent years, Reinhart and Rogoff’s results have been highly influential as support for austerity policies in both Europe and the United States.
Herndon, Ash and Pollin find that a series of data errors and unsupportable statistical techniques led to an inaccurate representation of the actual relationship between public debt levels and GDP growth. They find that when properly calculated, average GDP growth for advanced economies at public debt-to-GDP ratios over 90 percent is not dramatically different than when debt-to-GDP ratios are lower.
Almost immediately the Herndon, Ash, Pollin findings went viral with lots of social media buzz on Twitter and Facebook. The story has garnered extensive national and international coverage. Below is a list of media coverage to date.
Sick of being trampled by the big boys ridin’ their bulls and bears? SAFER was founded by UMass Econ Chair Gerald Epstein and Jane D’Arista to bring sanity and safety to the financial system.Fun at a rodeo; not so great for the economy
Economists’ Committee for Stable, Accountable, Fair and Efficient Financial Reform (SAFER)
The Economists’ Committee for Stable, Accountable, Fair and Efficient Financial Reform (SAFER) is a focal point, clearinghouse and coordinating mechanism for progressive economists and analysts to gather and present their views on financial re-regulation and reform; to reach, to the degree possible, a consensus on the key issues relating to regulation and reform; and to help incorporate this work into the public debate over these issues that will ensue over the coming six to nine months or so. By bringing these analysts together to speak in a concerted voice, we will be able to broaden the perspective on financial regulation and reform, and enhance our impact on this public debate.
