Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle famously called economics the “dismal science.” It wasn’t hard to see why this week (even while important economic news was understandably overshadowed by the horrible events surrounding the Boston Marathon), as politics is getting in the way of some of the serious and substantive policy questions raised by some significant new academic findings.
In research that has been featured prominently in the press and the blogosphere, three economists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have cast significant doubt on widely cited findings by Reinhart and Rogoff (RR) which seemed to demonstrate that countries which run up big debts (generally in excess of 90 percent of GDP) suffer a major penalty in terms of economic growth. Continue reading
Above the Market 