<story><title>An Excel error led Austria&apos;s SPÖ to announce the wrong candidate as the winner</title><url>https://twitter.com/joncstone/status/1665728784366960641</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>irthomasthomas</author><text>A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a policy of economic austerity. The spreadsheet had demonstrated that, historically, countries that adopted austerity came out of recession faster. Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually proved the opposite. But by then the damage was done.&lt;p&gt;Edit: It was UMASS grad students that spotted the spreadsheet errors by these Harvard&amp;#x2F;IMF heavy weights:)&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Reinhart and Rogoff kindly provided us with the working spreadsheet from the RR analysis. With the working spreadsheet, we were able to approximate closely the published RR results. While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics.
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&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;peri.umass.edu&amp;#x2F;fileadmin&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;working_papers&amp;#x2F;working_papers_301-350&amp;#x2F;WP322.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;peri.umass.edu&amp;#x2F;fileadmin&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;working_papers&amp;#x2F;working_...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timy2shoes</author><text>In addition to their excel errors, their analysis required excluding the  Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.  Once these countries were included in their analysis, their argument falls apart.  To me, it&amp;#x27;s clear that this was a case of very selective researcher degrees of freedom to support austerity.  Why anyone would take Reinhart or Rogoff seriously after this farce is beyond my comprehension.</text></comment>
<story><title>An Excel error led Austria&apos;s SPÖ to announce the wrong candidate as the winner</title><url>https://twitter.com/joncstone/status/1665728784366960641</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>irthomasthomas</author><text>A series of excel errors, including failure to copy down a formula to the whole column, led many governments to adopt a policy of economic austerity. The spreadsheet had demonstrated that, historically, countries that adopted austerity came out of recession faster. Once the errors in the spread where fixed, it actually proved the opposite. But by then the damage was done.&lt;p&gt;Edit: It was UMASS grad students that spotted the spreadsheet errors by these Harvard&amp;#x2F;IMF heavy weights:)&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  Reinhart and Rogoff kindly provided us with the working spreadsheet from the RR analysis. With the working spreadsheet, we were able to approximate closely the published RR results. While using RR’s working spreadsheet, we identified coding errors, selective exclusion of available data, and unconventional weighting of summary statistics.
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&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;peri.umass.edu&amp;#x2F;fileadmin&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;working_papers&amp;#x2F;working_papers_301-350&amp;#x2F;WP322.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;peri.umass.edu&amp;#x2F;fileadmin&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;working_papers&amp;#x2F;working_...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>listenallyall</author><text>Two of those 3 sound intentional: selective exclusion of data and unconventional weighting. The &amp;quot;coding errors&amp;quot; may also have been intentional. I would suggest more scrutiny of the authors and their motives before dismissing as &amp;quot;Excel errors, whoops&amp;quot;</text></comment>