Several of my colleagues on the Harvard faculty have recently been casualties in the cross-fire between fiscal austerians and stimulators.   Economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff have received an unbelievable amount of press attention, ever since they were discovered by three researchers at the University of Massachusetts to have made a spreadsheet error in the first of two papers that examined the statistical relationship between debt and growth.   They quickly conceded their mistake.

Then historian Niall Ferguson, also of Harvard, received much flack when — asked to comment on Keynes’ famous phrase  “In the long run we are all dead” — he “suggested that Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because he had no children, and that he had no children because he was gay.”   read more