(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

More worrisome is that the researchers excluded data that contradicts their hypothesis (that having national debt greater than 90% of GDP slows the economy) and gave heavier weighting to data that better supports it, but seriously? We wrecked the Greek economy and we're trying to wreck the UK and US economies based on an Excel error?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I think austerity is working exactly as intended. They might need to sell the whole 'concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of the exceedingly few' thing a bit better, if they want to keep it going without getting booted out of office (or shot, because the longer this goes on the less I think 'first against the wall when the revolution comes' is a joke), but I think it's working as intended.

[lliira]

Yes, this. The goal is not something that makes everyone's lives better; the goal is to service an ideology in which the state doesn't do much because it can't do much. They don't care about the way the world actually is. It's what happens when you put principles before people (as Cordelia Vorkosigan would say).

[alexseanchai]

*nods*