Kevin Roose, writing for New York Magazine, profiles Thomas Herndon, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student in economics. Herndon found a data error in an influential economics paper, entitled “Growth in a Time of Debt”. The mistake dampens the paper’s findings - results that have been used to advocate global austerity:
Herndon was stunned. As a graduate student, he’d just found serious problems in a famous economic study — the academic equivalent of a D-league basketball player dunking on LeBron James. “They say seeing is believing, but I almost didn’t believe my eyes,” he says. “I had to ask my girlfriend — who’s a Ph.D. student in sociology — to double-check it. And she said, ‘I don’t think you’re seeing things, Thomas.’”
I’ll give the authors, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the benefit of the doubt here. As a scientist, I am fearful of such mistakes whenever I perform numerical analysis. Even people who devote their life to such work are human. Kudos to Herndon for finding the mistake.