Simon Wren-Lewis — Mistakes

My guess is that the majority of pieces of empirical work by economists will contain at least one error somewhere. Errors become almost inevitable when large and diverse data sets are involved, like those constructed by Reinhart and Rogoff and Thomas Piketty. So finding these errors is not headline news. Nor, for this reason, is it particularly embarrassing for the economists concerned when these errors are found, particularly if they have made their data public or available to others. 

Errors and adjustments only matter if they influence key results.... 

With all this in mind, I have very mixed feelings about Chris Giles’s Financial Times splash. I applaud a journalist who is unwilling to take academic results or official figures on trust, and is prepared (and I guess has the resources) to get their hands dirty with data. Chris has consistently done this....

Yet I groaned when reading his latest FT article, with its emphasis on “mistakes and unexplained entries”. As far as I can see (read Ryan Avent here, and the longer Chris Giles post here, and Jonathan Hopkin here), the only issue of substance involves trends in the UK wealth income ratio, but of course an article headlined ‘Data sources on UK wealth income ratio differ’ would not have had the same punch.

Mainly MacroMistakes
Simon Wren-Lewis | Professor of Economics, Oxford University