“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.”
One of the fundamental ideas behind science is that results must be able to be replicated, and that peer review is essential. Three years later, and we're just now finding out that these guys made a typo (if you're charitable enough to believe that's what it was). If you didn't already think the state of economic ‘science’ was bad…
One of the mistakes is thinking that Economics is in a fact a science. It is not.
Second, I think it is only right that economic decisions that influenced the lives of millions should be based on political principles, and not technical ones. The latter only give you things like the long-term suicidal one-child policy, and you also don't get anyone to blame, while the first at least give you the chance to change course mid-way and a sort of feedback mechanism.
Also, using 50-year cycles in order to determine long term economic "truths" is a joke.
One of the fundamental ideas behind science is that results must be able to be replicated, and that peer review is essential. Three years later, and we're just now finding out that these guys made a typo (if you're charitable enough to believe that's what it was). If you didn't already think the state of economic ‘science’ was bad…