A few years back there was some big economics study that supposedly proved that countries whose governments “stayed out of” the market had better metrics or some such neoliberal thing. Except a grad student figured out it was all bunk because he looked at the supporting documents and saw that the formula they used in Excel to find that claim missed like a third of the rows of the data and once the formula was extended all the way down, it produced an opposite conclusion.
There's also this massive 2010 paper called "Growth in a Time of Debt" that was used by the EU to justify austerity measures in Greece and elsewhere. The paper claimed that countries with debt ratios above 90 per cent of GDP suffer a yearly 0.1 per cent contraction in their economies, so therefore you have to reduce debt ratios to below 90% so GDP can grow again. Was cited everywhere, a massive impact on the real world, one of the pillars of austerity.
Turns out this is completely wrong because their sum in Excel was "accidentally" missing a few countries and instead when they corrected that Excel issue turns out "that countries with the quoted debt ratio grew 2.2 per cent, only 1 per cent less than nations with lower debt ratios."
As a former grad student, you both dive into enough papers to see that a lot of the supporting evidence is bullshit in some way, and then when you write your own you hope nobody does that to you lol (I would never do this for a published paper though).
A few years back there was some big economics study that supposedly proved that countries whose governments “stayed out of” the market had better metrics or some such neoliberal thing. Except a grad student figured out it was all bunk because he looked at the supporting documents and saw that the formula they used in Excel to find that claim missed like a third of the rows of the data and once the formula was extended all the way down, it produced an opposite conclusion.
There's also this massive 2010 paper called "Growth in a Time of Debt" that was used by the EU to justify austerity measures in Greece and elsewhere. The paper claimed that countries with debt ratios above 90 per cent of GDP suffer a yearly 0.1 per cent contraction in their economies, so therefore you have to reduce debt ratios to below 90% so GDP can grow again. Was cited everywhere, a massive impact on the real world, one of the pillars of austerity.
Turns out this is completely wrong because their sum in Excel was "accidentally" missing a few countries and instead when they corrected that Excel issue turns out "that countries with the quoted debt ratio grew 2.2 per cent, only 1 per cent less than nations with lower debt ratios."
Per: https://voxeurop.eu/en/austerity-measures-in-europe-are-due-to-an-excel-error/
Yeah that was the one I was thinking of, just didn’t remember all the details correctly.
As a former grad student, you both dive into enough papers to see that a lot of the supporting evidence is bullshit in some way, and then when you write your own you hope nobody does that to you lol (I would never do this for a published paper though).
Sounds interesting, do you have a source? I couldn’t immediately find it.
Here’s an article on the error. I had the orientation wrong though, it was columns that were omitted.
Thanks! It’s an interesting read.