Friday, October 19, 2012

John Taylor: I’m Right Regardless of What Anyone Else Says

Noah Smith has an excellent discussion of what he calls “Reinhart-Rogoff vs. Bordo-Haubrich (with grandstanding by John Taylor)”. Please read it as it has become part of the Presidential debate about whether we should condemn the Obama Administration for the slowness of this recovery or we should understand that recoveries from financial crisis are often slow unless our politicians have the wisdom to use massive fiscal stimulus (which Obama originally wanted but the Republicans said no). Noah at one point fired off this shot:
First of all, do not listen to John Taylor. He is not being a scientist right now, he is being a politician ... And I think no one should take John Taylor's promotion of B&H's results seriously, since he is part of Team Romney.
Via Greg Mankiw comes another post from John Taylor who is still promoting B&H:
In sum, the weak recovery deniers have not made their case.
While Taylor does link to Paul Krugman, both he and Mankiw ignore Noah’s post. I guess we could point this out in the comment section of their blogs but guess what – they do not allow comments. Hey – that is their right but would it be too much to ask for them to cite the well written posts on this topic from other economist bloggers such as Noah? Oh wait – as members of Team Romney I guess it would be too much to expect them to engage in an honest debate? Never mind! Update: Noah correctly notes that John Taylor's latest was posted before his excellent post. Note, however, Greg Mankiw's list was posted just today and Greg failed to include Noah's post. So Noah is being very kind and fair to John. We shall see if John follows up and includes Noah's discussion on his blog.

2 comments:

Noah Smith said...

The post in which Taylor links to Paul Krugman was published before I wrote my post (in fact I link to it), so he did not ignore me.

ProGrowthLiberal said...

Fair point Noah. We'll see if Mankiw or Taylor put forth an update with your contribution.