Gopher's thesis of the day for this Forum thread:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5A5Eu0ra3I
I thought I would add a couple of semi-informed comments to offer a bit of context.
Reasons to be skeptical:
* The first thing that jumps out at me is that the underlying paper is from a school of public policy. A general hierarchy of prestige for economists would be an economist in an Economics Department, an economist in a Business School, an economist in a Public Policy School and then an economist in a government agency.
* While the Journal of Political Economy is one of the top five high prestige journals in economics, it is the big journal based at the University of Chicago, and despite everything built into all of the review processes, there are clear biases rooted in interpersonal politics at even the big journals that line up to a degree with whether scholars are based in or aligned with their institutional homes.
* The underlying methodology (cross-country, econometric analyses of time series data) for this kind of macroeconomic analysis had certainly fallen out of favor by the time that I entered grad school because of strong critiques of some of the very inconsistent results produced during the early-to-mid-1990s.
Reasons to not be casually dismissive:
* One of the secondary authors is Xavier Sala-i-Martin, who besides being practically worshiped by my Catalan office mate from my first year of grad school is one of the founding fathers of this methodology.
* I am originally from Texas and worked as a commodities broker before quitting and going to grad school. When I changed life paths, one of my cousins was the corporate counsel for one of the global super-major integrated oil companies. He was the lawyer who attended the official quarterly meetings of their Board of Directors. Back in the 2000s, every time that I talked to him at holiday gatherings, he wanted to almost obsessively talk about electricity generation and consumption in China, because they were clearly following this time series closely and finding its growth to be inconsistent with the official GDP figures. My cousin repeatedly asked me to opine on research being done by their in-house economist and her team and whether I found it convincing (whether I supported my cousin's personal interpretations as a non-"expert"). Obviously, hundred billion dollar, multi-decade investment decisions were being made at the time on the basis of how believable Chinese GDP figures were and to what degree this massive energy company should deflate the official numbers. So breakdowns in expected relationships connecting 2008 nighttime luminescence ==> 2008 electricity consumption ==> 2008 GDP figures was being questioned and commented upon at the time by serious and well-informed people.
(The untimely death of Macrocat is obviously an international tragedy felt around the world.)