Spreadsheet Horror Stories
> In a paper, 'Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff,' Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst criticise a 2010 paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, 'Growth in a Time of Debt.' They find three main issues: First, Reinhart and Rogoff selectively exclude years of high debt and average growth. Second, they use a debatable method to weight the countries. Third, there also appears to be a coding error that excludes high-debt and average-growth countries. All three bias in favor of their result, and without them you don't get their controversial result."<p>This one is kinda buried in the list. This is what motivated the harsh austerity measures in Greece. So an entire country was punished because of a bug in a spreadsheet.<p><a href="http://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-not-to-excel-at-economics-13646" rel="nofollow">http://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-...</a><p><a href="https://prospect.org/culture/books/the-crash-of-austerity-economics/" rel="nofollow">https://prospect.org/culture/books/the-crash-of-austerity-ec...</a><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr...</a><p><a href="https://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/04/17/how-microsoft-excel-tanked-the-global-economy" rel="nofollow">https://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/04/17/how-mic...</a><p><a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/dcyvro/the-colbert-report-austerity-s-spreadsheet-error" rel="nofollow">http://www.cc.com/video-clips/dcyvro/the-colbert-report-aust...</a><p>interview with herndon <a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/kbgnf0/the-colbert-report-austerity-s-spreadsheet-error---thomas-herndon" rel="nofollow">http://www.cc.com/video-clips/kbgnf0/the-colbert-report-aust...</a>