cbforever

. Basically, a couple economists (Reinhart & Rogoff) had published a big, influential research paper about how countries that have high levels of debt have slower economic growth. This paper was touted by a bunch of libertarians and fiscal conservatives, including Rand Paul, to justify "austerity measures." That is, government spending and social services need to be cut HARD to keep the economy from going under. This has been a major departure from the traditional view of countercyclical spending: that government spending needs to be HIGH during recessions in order to keep the economy from collapsing further.

Now a grad student wanted to double-check the paper and asked for the primary data. The economists happily tossed the excel spreadsheet his way, and he pored through it. He found a major excel spreadsheet error and reported it to his professors. They were flabbergasted. Austerity measures have been a major component of economic policies in many countries where the economy is going to shit, like Greece.

Now people are joking that "an Excel error may have destroyed the economy." Currently more economists are looking into the original paper by Reinhart & Rogoff and are tearing its premises to shreds on multiple levels.

Honestly, here's hoping we go back to more traditional economic approaches that have a history of working.

I used to get so pissed off when people used this word. But I'm allowed to be a hypocrite, and also they are stupid so suck it,

Technically it's only hypocrisy if you advocate the position you're contradicting, but yeah. I'm actually VERY surprised at how many fiscal conservatives/libertarians I meet here in Boston. I mean, I understand that California is typically viewed as a bastion of liberalism, but I generally thought it was because of our beliefs on social policies and such.

I've been having a lot of honest discussions with these guys, and invariably it turns out that they never really did any research into economic policy. Not even basic shit of what countercyclical spending means, or elementary New Deal stuff, or how and why infrastructure helps catalyze new economic developments. A lot of them have this somewhat naive perspective that "I'm fiscally conservative because I'm against wasteful spending." As if being against wasteful spending weren't a universal value.

One of my classmates, in a pre-medical masters program mind you, said "I'm against Universal Health Care, because I'm Republican." This was particularly galling to me, since we're all taught to emphasize the importance of evidence-based medicine and how we need to account for cost-benefit analyses of treatment. Seems kinda obvious. But a lot of my classmates don't hold this same value to social policy on medicine.

Man, between the IMF switching over to a Keynesian model & this bullshit, austerity is pretty throughly discredited.

As far as conservatives & lolbertatians - it really annoys me that

you just want everyone to own a farm desp i dont want to own a farm

Also here's a fun little time-waster: The Probability Broach, a graphic novel about a cop who is thrown into a parallel universe which ends up being an alternate history paradise because Libertarians control the world, everyone wears ponchos, and monkeys who are intelligent enough and are afforded rights because Libertarians are nice like that and would never fall prey to their base human instincts to subjugate and conquer.





Also of note:

*President Washington is executed by the "80-Proof Revolution," apparently named because of the hated whisky tax which sparked the revolt.
*The federal United States is replaced by the American Confederacy.
*John Wilkes Booth is assassinated by some asshole Hamiltonian Lawyer (Lincoln?)
*Thanks to the power of the Free Market, technology is 100 years ahead of its time and we have moon bases and shit.
*Guns. Guns EVERYWHERE.

Wait... so libertarianism leads to Planet of the Apes?

No.