[yyqux]

R&R's defense strategy seems currently to pretend that they weren't claiming anything in particular by the paper originally: "hey man, I was just putting it out there. I didn't, like, mean anything by it."

But their own public pronouncements, and the way they responded to other's interpretations of the results, pretty much indicated that they though they'd found firm evidence that there was some big non-linearity at 90%.

[SilasX]

I'm not claiming R/R are saints. I'm just objecting to ridiculous strawman implied by:

"We show that, contrary to R&R, there is no definitive threshold for the public debt/GDP ratio, beyond which countries will invariably suffer a major decline in GDP growth."

RR's claim is entirely statistical, so of course they're not going to claim that exceeding the ratio always ("invariably") leads to a major decline in growth.

RR's being wrong doesn't mean it's okay to insinuate they hold ridiculous positions that they really don't. That's just compounding public misconceptions.

[pseut]

Have you been following RR's op-eds, etc over the last two years? I have the impression that they've been less circumspect than you claim.

[SilasX]

"X carries too much/undesirable risk of Y" != "X unavoidably leads to Y"

The former is what RR said, the latter is the strawman being attributed to them.