I was very chuffed when my favourite econblogger made one of my comments the centrepiece of a post. That is a prominent economist being nice.
Then there are economists engaged in public putdowns. In 2002 Kenneth Rogoff penned an open letter to Joseph Stiglitz. In Scott Sumner’s words:
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 …
Carmen Reinhoff and Kenneth Rogoff are co-authors of the splendid study This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
Perhaps it is a bad idea to seriously annoy a Chess grandmaster, which Rogoff is.
As an aside, I have no particular view about any connection between debt and growth, an issue which has become particularly heated due to controversy over the computations in the 2010 paper by Rogoff and Reinhoff. Though it is a good idea to read Evsey Domar‘s classic 1944 paper on the subject. (But Domar is a particular intellectual hero of mine because of his work on the economics of bondage.)
This is also the Saturday chit-chat post.
ADDENDA On debt and growth, see this comment on the empirical and analytical difficulties.
ADDENDA ALSO Could not resist the above Dilbert gem (via)
