John Cassidy vs Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong is clearly much more important than I am. When I say rude things about John Cassidy, nothing much happens. But when Brad says rude things about John Cassidy, he gets a stinging riposte from Cassidy in his comments section, where Cassidy calls DeLong's posting "misleading and intemperate," and finishes with quite a flourish:

Brad, you are forever berating economic journalists. Some of that is healthy: we all make mistakes. But somebody who sets himself up as a professional arbiter needs to have high standards. In this instance, the quality of your research was unworthy of a wire service rookie, let alone a tenured professor at a prestigious university.

The substantive disagreement between Cassidy and DeLong concerns the US economy's growth prospects in mid-2002. Cassidy says they were healthy:

By the middle of 2002, however, it was clear that for whatever reason—low interest rates, the Bush tax cuts, increased military spending—the economy was staging an amazingly robust recovery.

DeLong says that Cassidy is wrong, and that "the recovery did not become anything anybody could call 'robust' in any sense until 2004."

In his note on DeLong's blog, Cassidy points out that in June 2002, the official GDP report for the first quarter of 2002 showed extremely strong growth of 5.6% – which certainly looks pretty robust on its face.

I'm not qualified to adjudicate this debate, but I can dig up some contemporaneous accounts of that GDP report. In fact, it was even stronger than Cassidy remembers: the final estimate of Q1 GDP growth, as reported by CNN Money on June 27, 2002, was a stunning 6.1%. On the other hand, no one at the time seemed to view the report as evidence of "an amazingly robust recovery" – Mark Gongloff's report card on the US economy, which was published the day after the 6.1% figure came out, concluded with an overall rating of just C+.

If I had to pick between the two sides, I think I'd come down in the middle. I don't think that the US economy was obviously doing very well in mid-2002, but I don't think that Cassidy's more upbeat view qualifies him for DeLong's "Stupidest Man Alive" crown. The cohort of economics commentators who say vastly more idiotic things than John Cassidy is legion, which implies that DeLong was too harsh on Cassidy, at least in his headline.

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