An excerpt from  Dean Baker in yesterday's Guardian

Just to remind folks, Reinhart and Rogoff (R&R) are the authors of……………..(a) history of financial crises, This Time is Different. ....…the main conclusion…….. is that high ratios of debt to GDP lead to a long periods of slow growth.

(But)……… the new paper by my friends at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash, and Robert Pollin. Herndon, Ash, and Pollin (HAP) corrected the spreadsheets of Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They show the correct numbers tell a very different story……….(in fact).................causation (may go) the other way. 

.But ………. we need not concern ourselves with any arguments this complicated. The basic R&R story was simply they got their numbers wrong..................The most important of these errors was excluding four years of growth data from New Zealand (when)........ it was above the 90% debt-to-GDP threshold. When these four years are added in, the average growth rate in New Zealand for its high debt years was (a positive ) 2.6%, (instead of a negative)7.6% ..

Correcting this one mistake alone adds 1.5 percentage points to the average growth rate for the high-debt countries. This eliminates most of the falloff in growth that R&R find from high debt levels.

Unlike Niall Ferguson, Paul Ryan,  and the sky- is- falling brigade on the financial networks Ken Rogoff seems, and may well be, eminently reasonable. But not right. The leftist  economists are understandably wondering whether this was really just an error since the R&R thesis has been so convenient for politicians from Merkel  to McCain who think that if a little unemployment is good for the economy a lot would be even better.

According to the FT Rogoff was a key adviser before the 1910 election to George Oborne , now the UK chancellor and Osborne " has cited  ""only once"" according to his aides the Rogoff-Reinhart debt theory in defence of his policy". Since soon after the appearance of This Time Is Different serious economists have complained that they couldn't duplicate R&R's mathematical conclusions. Which means that the Rs were alerted to those doubts. One could wonder, I do, why this didn't cause them to review those calculations and announce the mistake themselves.

Damage their political friends? Depress sales of This Time is Different?

 A 40s radio series used to proclaim

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

so I suppose it could have been an error.  Or not. Whatever.  For 4 years R&R's conclusions have been used to justify  evictions, hunger and unemployment from Dublin to Athens. And you can be sure we'd have been hearing them intoned from a podium on the White House lawn if  we (or the Supreme Court again,) had made the mistake of electing Romney..