An error correction comment (ie, by a commenter, not the newspaper) over at the Indy:
Worth reading up the folly of austerity and the way Osbourne and folks of his political leaning jumped on a paper by Economists Reinhart and Rogoff that cited debt above 80% of GDP as a cause of negative growth. They used this to convince everyone that austerity was needed.
However the maths was found to be bad and the paper debunked by Harvard students. Reinhart and Rogoff apologised.
Sigh.
It was 90%, Reinhart and Rogoff are at Harvard, it was people at UMass who found the coding error……
Also can’t spell ‘Osborne’.
Still, it’s perfectly reasonable to remind everyone that, however conceited they may be, Leading Economists can’t be trusted to use Excel.
Also worth noting that the Excel error made absolutely no difference to R&R’s conclusions as it only affected a measure they don’t favour.
But, hey, when has the Indy ever let mere facts get in the way of a political point?
R&R’s Excel error is neither here nor there. Their real crime is that they have no grasp of the nature of national debts, deficits and the relationship between those and inflation and unemployment. It was that that lead them to advocate austerity at the height of the crisis, not the Excell error.
The total amount of economic damage done by R&R greatly exceeds the economic damage done by the two nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As a general rule, I ignore comments which spell the Chancellor’s name as “Osbourne” or which use apostrophe’s to indicate the plural.
I suppose I must add to my ignore list comments which misspell the word “Excel”.