It’s Harvard time, baby: “Kerfuffle” is what you call it when you completely botched your data but you don’t want to change your conclusions.

For it’s Harvard this, an’ Harvard that, an’ “Give the debt the boot!” But it’s “Academic kerfuffle,” when the guns begin to shoot. — Rudyard Kipling, American Economic Review, 1890.

Remember the “Excel error”? This was the econ paper from 2010 by Reinhart and Rogoff, where it turned out they completely garbled their analysis by accidentally shifting a column in their Excel table, and then it took years for it to all come out? And this was no silly Psychological Science / PPNAS bit of NPR and Gladwell bait; it was a serious article with policy relevance.

At the time this story blew up, I had some sympathy for Reinhart and Rogoff. Nobody suggested that they’d garbled their data on purpose. Even aside from that, the data analysis does not seem to have been so great (see here for some discussion), but lots of social scientists are not so great with statistics, and even if you disagree with Reinhart and Rogoff’s policy recommendations, you have to give them credit for attacking a live research problem. In this post from 2013, I criticized Reinhart and Rogoff for not admitting they’d messed up (“I recommend they start by admitting their error and then going on from there. I think they should also thank Herndon, Ash, and Pollin for finding multiple errors in their paper. Admit it and move forward.”), while at the same time recognizing that researchers are not trained to admit error. I was disappointed with the behavior of the authors of that paper after they were confronted with their errors, but I was not surprised or very annoyed.

But then I read this post by Gary Smith and now I am kinda mad. Smith writes:

In 2010, two Harvard professors, Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff, published a paper in the American Economic Review, one of the world’s most-respected economics journals, arguing that when the ratio of a nation’s federal debt to its GDP rises above a 90% tipping point, the nation is likely to slide into an economic recession. . . .

Reinhart/Rogoff had made a spreadsheet error that omitted five countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark). Three of these countries had experienced debt/GDP ratios above 90% and all three had positive growth rates during those years. In addition, some data for Australia (1946–50), Canada (1946–50), and New Zealand (1946–49) are available, but were inexplicably not included in the Reinhart/Rogoff calculations.

The New Zealand omission was particularly important because these were four of the five years when New Zealand’s debt/GDP ratio was above 90%. Looking at all five years, the average GDP growth rate was 2.6%. With four of the five years excluded, New Zealand’s growth rate during the remaining high-debt year was a calamitous -7.6%.

There was also unusual averaging. . . . The bottom line is that Reinhart and Rogoff reported that the overall average GDP growth rate in high-debt years was a recessionary -0.1% but if we fix the above problems, the average is 2.2%.

That part of the story I’d heard before. But then there was this:

In a 2013 New York Times opinion piece, Reinhart and Rogoff dismissed the criticism of their study as “academic kerfuffle.”

C’mon. You are two Harvard professors; you published an article in an academic journal, leveraged the reputation of academic economics to make policy recommendations to the U.S. congress, and then you talk about “academic kerfuffle”! If you don’t want “academic kerfuffle,” maybe you should just write op-eds, maybe start a radio call-in show, etc.

It’s Harvard this, an’ Harvard that, when all is going well. But then when some pesky students and faculty at faculty at the University of Massachusetts check your data and find that you screwed everything up, then it’s academic kerfuffle!

UMass, can you imagine? The nerve of those people!

So, yeah, now I’m annoyed at Reinhart and Rogoff. If you don’t like academic kerfuffle, get out of goddam academia already. For a pair of decorated Harvard professors to dismiss serious criticism as “kerfuffle”—that’s a disgrace. It was a disgrace in 2013 and it remains a disgrace until they apologize for this anti-scientific, anti-scholarly attitude.

P.S. Just for some perspective on the way that work had been hyped, here’s a NYT puff piece on Reinhart and Rogoff from 2010:

Like a pair of financial sleuths, Ms. Reinhart and her collaborator from Harvard, Kenneth S. Rogoff, have spent years investigating wreckage scattered across documents from nearly a millennium of economic crises and collapses. They have wandered the basements of rare-book libraries, riffled through monks’ yellowed journals and begged central banks worldwide for centuries-old debt records. And they have manually entered their findings, digit by digit, into one of the biggest spreadsheets you’ve ever seen.

OK, you can’t fault the Times for a puff that appeared nearly three years before the error was reported. Still, it’s kinda funny that, of all things, they were praising those researchers for . . . their spreadsheet!