> Nor is this surprising; the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there.
The data Reinhart and Rogoff used hadn't been analysed together before so their work was original, and it got widely cited. The results failed to be reproducible, and now the analysis has been found to have multiple methodological errors, of which the spreadsheet error is just a minor component. Reinhart and Rogoff didn't cause austerity, but they published a high impact paper supporting austerity that has now been discredited. Also, it would be interesting to know how you get the impression that their results "agree broadly with every other paper and model out there".
I suspect it isn't hard to find papers that show a link between high debt levels and weak economic growth. Or do you think the consensus among economists is that no such relationship exists?
There's a difference between "papers" and "every other paper". Instead of a consensus, economists are split into camps over the question whether austerity harms or improves economic growth. There's been criticism of austerity even from the IMF, for instance. Discrediting Reinhart and Rogoff's paper (published without peer-review, by the way) in particular is important because they were the first to collect and analyse data from so many sources and their results couldn't be replicated and are now shown to be incorrect.
The data Reinhart and Rogoff used hadn't been analysed together before so their work was original, and it got widely cited. The results failed to be reproducible, and now the analysis has been found to have multiple methodological errors, of which the spreadsheet error is just a minor component. Reinhart and Rogoff didn't cause austerity, but they published a high impact paper supporting austerity that has now been discredited. Also, it would be interesting to know how you get the impression that their results "agree broadly with every other paper and model out there".