Standard practice is to go recession trough to trough, which would be a much more pessimistic measure. I think www.cepr.net has some of this but I haven't checked in a while. But why are you lads so hesitant to explore the other - and increasingly sophisticated - non-GDP measures of genuine 'wealth' accumulation, such as the WB's Where is the Wealth of Nations? Do you think nonrenewable resource depletion, pollution, fixed capital depreciation and 'human capital' (vomit) are unimportant? Doug, have you ever tried to work this stuff into your analysis?
> These extensions countervail so much that they become meaningless.
>
Not if they run out of steam, they don't. Think most emerging markets since 1994, and most Third World countries since 1982.
> Especially since the frequently advertised comeuppance never seems to
> come up.
>
$20 b hit to Citi? That must smart. Citi and Merrill's bosses fired? Ouch.
> That Reinhart & Rogoff paper that annoyed you so much is interesting
> because it shows, among other things, that financial crises are
> pretty regular things.
Econ 101 does too, right? It's identifying causality and avoiding multicollinearity that seems to stump them.
> Their real-world effects
Come on Doug, that's the language of banal multiple regressions nor
reasoning.
> range from none at
> all (Barings 1995) to a recession lasting about two years, with an
> average growth rate of -2% (for the "Big Five" crises in their
> classification). That's nasty, but not all that big a deal - and none
> had serious political effects.
Again, where's the rest of the world in all this? With hundreds of IMF
riots and many dozens of government overthrows recorded in the last
quarter century alone, it's a stunning blind spot, no?
> I think one of the reasons the paper
> annoys you is precisely because it shows the ordinariness of
> financial crises.
>
>
I plead guilty. Isn't that what economists do best to cover market failure? Isn't it our job to identify what's really at stake in the malfunctioning of the capitalist system?
> In other words, if crisis doesn't happen in practice, it's still
> lurking there somewhere in theory?
>
>
Hey we've done these semantics before, so let's leave that at
agree-to-disagree. You've never said what's wrong with the Coxian
approach, epistemologically, by the way. Especially if you're a
structuralist, Doug, you owe it an engagement.
>
> Yeah, Marty, help Patrick prove that the Chinese boom has all been an
> illusion!
>
>
Hey if he ever pitches up to this party, his drugs will blow your mind (as he did mine in Seoul and Caracas last year).
> Africa is really the outlier in the capitalist world. It's
> understandable why, after four centuries of imperial looting. But
> it's not representative of what's been going on. China and India
> have, what?, four or five times the population of Africa.
>
Hey man, we're living your future now, as the current most extreme version of uneven/combined development. Some evidence in our new journal issue on the SA economy: http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/Africanus%20poli%20econ%20special%20issue.pdf