“THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT” was published last September, just as the nation was coming to grips with a financial crisis that had nearly spiraled out of control and a job market that lay in tatters. Despite bailout after bailout, stimulus after stimulus, economic armageddon still seemed nigh.
Given this backdrop, it’s perhaps not surprising that a book arguing that the crisis was a rerun, and not a wholly novel catastrophe, managed to become a best seller. So far, nearly 100,000 copies have been sold, according to its publisher, the Princeton University Press.
Still, its authors laugh when asked about the book’s opportune timing.
Co-author Carmen Reinhart in digging through old records and piecing together a vast puzzle of disconnected data points, her ultimate goal, in the book, has always been “to see the forest,” she says, “and explain it.”
Ms. Reinhart has bounced back and forth across the Beltway: she left the I.M.F. in Washington and began teaching in 1996 at the University of Maryland, from which co-author Kenneth Rogoff recruited her when he needed a deputy at the I.M.F. in 2001. When she left that post, she returned to the university.
Despite the large following that her work has drawn, she says she feels that the heavyweights of her profession have looked down upon her research as useful but too simplistic.
“You know, everything is simple when it’s clearly explained,” she contends. “It’s like with Sherlock Holmes. He goes through this incredible deductive process from Point A to Point B, and by the time he explains everything, it makes so much sense that it sounds obvious and simple. It doesn’t sound clever anymore.”
But, she says, “economists love being clever.”
They began the book around 2003, not long after Mr. Rogoff lured Ms. Reinhart back to the I.M.F. to serve as his deputy. The pair had already been collaborating fruitfully, finding that her dogged pursuit of data and his more theoretical public policy eye were well matched.
Although their book is studiously nonideological, and is more focused on patterns than on policy recommendations, it has become fodder for the highly charged debate over the recent growth in government debt.
The recent G-20 meeting in Toronto has resolved to engineer tightened government spending to reduce global government deficits and here in the U.S. budget hawks have cited the book’s warnings about the perils of escalating public and private debt.