http://ibnlive.in.com/news/how-thoma.../386213-2.html
Quote:
In the world of economic luminaries, it doesn't get much bigger than Reinhart and Rogoff, whose work has had enormous influence in one of the biggest economic policy debates of the age. [...]
Their study, which found economic growth slows dramatically when a government's debt exceeds 90 per cent of a country's annual economic output, has been cited by policymakers around the world as justification for slashing spending.
Former US vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, is one influential politician who has cited the report to justify a budget slashing agenda. Using the two professors' data, Herndon found that instead of a dramatic fall in growth, the decline was much milder, slowing to about 2.2 per cent, instead of the slump to minus 0.1 per cent that Reinhart and Rogoff predicted.
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Seriously, how the heck does this happen? You've got a study that's influencing the direction of the global economy, and it turns out the authors didn't even get their sum function right in Excel.
