Ever since the paper was first circulated, austerians-advocates of fiscal austerity, of immediate sharp cuts in government spending-had cited its alleged findings to defend their position and attack their critics.
Why? Because the paper in question, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” by the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, had acquired touchstone status in the debate over economic policy. Looking back, we might even conclude that it changed the course of policy. But in April 2013, the discovery of such a mistake-actually, a coding error in a spreadsheet, coupled with several other flaws in the analysis-not only became the talk of the economics profession, but made headlines. In normal times, an arithmetic mistake in an economics paper would be a complete nonevent as far as the wider world was concerned. President Barack Obama and Representative Paul Ryan at a bipartisan meeting on health insurance reform, Washington, D.C., February 2010
