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."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.http://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how-...https://prospect.org/culture/books/the-crash-of-austerity-ec...https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr...https://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/04/17/how-mic...http://www.cc.com/video-clips/dcyvro/the-colbert-report-aust...interview with herndon http://www.cc.com/video-clips/kbgnf0/the-colbert-report-aust...