I take it from that you haven't read the paper, or read it with the same care you read what I said. I did not "twist" numbers, at all. I put the same sort of caveats on the USE of numbers that the authors of the papers put, but that those seeking to use simplified conclusions either didn't read, don't understand or conveniently omitted.
For instance, Dustmann and Frattini didn't attempt to consider non-fiscal impacts, as it wasn't what their paper was about. This does not mean they do not exist, but simply wasn't what they were researching.
There are other reports, such as at least four from the IPPR, and more from MigrationWatch, and also the overall House of Lords report which drew conclusions based on a lot of them.
However, this is the world of academia. If you take two different authors (or pairs/groups of authors) and try to compare conclusions, you are immediately going to hit a fundamental obstacle, which is that they work on different datasets, including and excluding different groups, often based on different time-series, use different assumptions and methodologies and inevitably come up with different conclusions.
Some conclude net benefit, some net loss, some a range which goes both sides of neutral into net benefit or net loss depending on which case you use from the range the report suggests.
My point, if you reread what I said, wasn't that these reports have conclusions which are wrong. It was the bland assertions, in the post I quoted, of apparent FACT which categorically is not supported by the papers people usually quote when asserting such facts. The paper's own authors, with commendable academic rigour, go to some lengths to detail the weaknesses in the available data, and the nature of the assumptions they make.
But they do make a lot of assumptions. If you start changing the treatments they used based on the assumptions they make, which by definition may be wrong, the outputs of their model change.
My criticism is not that they are wrong. They may not be.
My criticism is that an academic conclusion based in incomplete and in some areas inaccurate data, treated to a whole series of assumptions and statistical processes are then treated as Holy Writ, and certain fact, as if they were the wisdom of God Incarnate.
If people are going to use academic papers like these to support an argument, at least have the intellectual honesty to portray them for what they are, which is an academic study, not Canon Law.
This whole issue is a perfect example, in a microcosm, of precisely what's been wrong with this whole referendum debate .... a lack of considered argument, of considering the argument of others. It lacks an honest acceptance that on so many aspects of the debate, there are no categoric answers. How can there be, unless one campaign team or the other have a time machine and nipped forward to take a peek at what the future holds?
Cameron et.al. are stating economic projections of 2030 as if they were fact, when they are simply modelling projections based on models that predict outcomes in Autumn that are proven significantly wrong by Spring the very next year. Leave have incoming immigration predictions that Cassandra herself would be embarrased by and a 350m/week figure which, while technically accurate if and only if the exact definition is given, is so grossly misleading as to be an offence to the intelligence of anyone with an IQ higher than one of the straightened bananas some of them would have us believe in.
Both official campaigns have been treating us, the people, as idiots and I for one am flaming furious with the whole damn lot of them for it.
A very large proportion of each of the several threads here on it have been even worse.
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