The Reinhart & Rogoff debt/growth paper continues to make a stir for it’s basic Excel errors. Colbert has the latest & funniest take on it.
Two things about this surprise me.
Confronted with obvious and irrefutable errors, the authors double down and admit nothing. They also downplay the significance of the results, ‘… we are very careful in all our papers to speak of “association” and not “causality” …’
But of course the (amplified) message, Debt/GDP>90%=doom, was taken causally in the policy world; see the multiple clips in the intro to the Colbert video. Politicians are nuts to accord one paper in a sea of macroeconomic thought so much weight, but I guess this was the one they liked.