Econintersect: Click Read more >> below graphic to see today’s list.
The top of today’s reading list has two articles which show that Reinhart and Rogoff had correlation and causation backwards regarding increasing debt and slowing growth …….. and the last article discusses how to invest in bonds when interest rates are rising.
- After crunching Reinhart and Rogoff’s data, we’ve concluded that high debt does not slow growth (Miles Kimball and Yichuan Wang, Quartz) Posted previously but worth revisiting. Graph on left below indicates that future growth is little affected by debt/GDP ratio. Graph on the right indicates lower past growth is associated with increasing debt/GDP ratio. In other words, rather than high debt causing slower growth, the data indicate that, if anything, it is more likely that slow growth causes higher debt.
- Guest Post: Reinhart/Rogoff and Growth in a Time Before Debt (Arindrajit Dube, Next New Deal) This also has been listed previously. Results show the same dependancies as Kimball and Wang (above.) This study goes further to mathematically isolate cause and effect.
- How two Iranian brothers created one of the world’s first travel documentaries (Kevin Rushby, The Guardian)
- What Passes for Education In America Is Often Just Indoctrination (Elliot Sperber, AlterNet)
- 7 Things Clients Must Know to Stay Solvent in Retirement: Evensky (John Sullivan, ThinkAdvisor)
- Masked statistical recalibrations in GDP revisions (Salil Mehta, Statistical Ideas) To Econintersect the effects pointed out here are related to an old measurement bugaboo: trying to find significance in the small differences between two larger things. Measurement errors and uncertainties can be larger than the difference making the result meaningless.
- European Pundits Starting to Give Up on the Eurozone (Yves Smith and Yanis Varoufakis, Naked Capitalism) The economic impossibility of the current EU country positions must be resolved with either eurozone break-up or Germany paying for Spain much the same way New Jersy pays for Kentucky.
- Existing cropland could feed 4 billion more people (News Release, University of Minnesota)
- How Technology Is Destroying Jobs (David Rotman, MIT Technology Review) Hat tips to Roger Erickson and Sanjeev Kulkarni. See also GEI Analysis.
- Investing In Bonds When Rates Are Rising (Tom Dalpiaz, Advisor Perspectives)
