I still don't have an answer to Jerome's question: how do you get from the numbers in that table to the conclusions drawn by Hughes.

As JakeS appears to recognise the approach, but when trying to reconstruct it runs into errors, I would say that it was done by torturing econometrics software and ignoring errors. It would be interesting to know exactly how (ie what econometrics software, and how it was tortured) but if the possibilities are many I doubt it would be worth the effort.

eurogreen:

What I find particularly annoying is that initially, people here accepted his conclusions at face value and tried to find excuses for the dramatic declines he asserts.

I don't see why that would be annoying. Given a report that tries to obfuscate in a number of ways we each have different backgrounds that makes us react more strongly to different things. Assumption of good faith - which is helpful in understanding other perspectives - also applies until one is certain the author is a liar (which could be from the start if one remembers their history). So areas of the report outside what is noted as false is treated as assumed honest. The strenght of this community is the multitude of perspectives.

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