At this point, it seems that everybody with an internet connection knows about Herndon, Ash, and Pollin’s (HAP) rebuttal of Reinhart-Rogoff’s (RR) paper on public debt and growth. Minutes after the news started to go round the web though, I was asked what I thought by friends whose interests are quite removed from economics. They were shocked that Harvard professors could make such embarrassing mistakes in their excel file, and that austerity decisions could be based on such an imprudent error.
But I gave them a different perspective:
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