alt Hacker NewsThe consequences here don’t seem all that bad, it’s just a silly management fad. By contrast, “Growth in a Time of Debt” from Reinhardt and Rogoff steered multiple national governments into pointless self-destructive and immiserating austerity, despite being equally bunk, and none of the authors ever saw any consequences for that either. You can’t even blame that one on “management science”, it was a straight macroeconomics paper.
There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
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That paper wasn’t even peer reviewed. If I remember it correctly it was published in the AER Papers and Proceedings.
Silly management fads waste huge amounts of time and resources and generate all manner of perverse incentives. They entrench institutional mediocrity as much as anything.
political? what about business? If junk science can help a huge market to keep selling, I think it will be the biggest blocker.
> pointless
I'm sure it benefitted some people.
So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo.
I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.
[1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro...
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190