Update: I’d encourage people to look at David Warsh’s post, and also Jim Hamilton’s. The Warsh post is from an admirer of Krugman, and is especially interesting. (HT: Tyler Cowen and Marcus Nunes.)
I used to think that Ken Rogoff’s 2002 letter to Joe Stiglitz was the most devastating demolition of the arguments of an esteemed (but rude) economist that I’d ever read. But now we have a new open letter to Paul Krugman:
We admire your past scholarly work, which influences us to this day. So it has been with deep disappointment that we have experienced your spectacularly uncivil behavior the past few weeks. You have attacked us in very personal terms, virtually non-stop, in your New York Times column and blog posts. Now you have doubled down in the New York Review of Books, adding the accusation we didn’t share our data. Your characterization of our work and of our policy impact is selective and shallow. It is deeply misleading about where we stand on the issues. And we would respectfully submit, your logic and evidence on the policy substance is not nearly as compelling as you imply.
. . .The accusation in the New York Review of Books is a sloppy neglect on your part to check the facts before charging us with a serious academic ethical infraction. You had already implicitly endorsed this from your perch at the New York Times by posting a link to a program that treated the misstatement as fact.
Fortunately, the “Wayback Machine” crawls the Internet and periodically makes wholesale copies of web pages. The debt/GDP database was first archived in October 2010 from Carmen’s University of Maryland webpage. The data migrated to ReinhartandRogoff.com in March 2011. There it sits with our other data, on inflation, crises dates, and exchange rates. These data are regularly sought and found for those doing research who care to look. The greater disclosure of debt data from official institutions is testament to this. The IMF began to construct historical public debt data only after we had provided a roadmap in the list of our detailed references in a 2009 book (and before that in a 2008 working paper) that explained how we had unearthed the data.
Our interaction with scholars and practitioners working on real world questions in our field is ongoing, and our doors remain open. So to accuse us of not sharing our data is an unfounded attack on our academic and personal integrity.
Ouch!
HT: Greg Mankiw