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Reinhart-Rogoff

verb: to show that someone's entire thesis is wrong because they made a minor data entry typo. Named for an incident in 2013 where an important academic paper that related high national debt to reduced GDP (written by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff) was revealed to be based on an Excel fat-finger. (They had averaged all visible cells in a row, but not all cells in the entire row, as they'd intended.) This was unfortunate, because the Reinhart-Rogoff paper had substantially (and, it turned out, incorrectly) influenced U.S. fiscal policy during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011.

I've posted the full data supporting this paper on GitHub, in case y'all want to try and Reinhart-Rogoff me.

by BCSWowbagger2 August 15, 2023