In this case, it looks like all the Very Serious People in Washington and around the world have been basing their economic models on a faulty Excel spreadsheet with a bad macro. Yes, you read that right, years of obscenely high unemployment fueled by purposefully low government investment has been justified by a coding error in the most commonly-used spreadsheet program available today....
As Herndon-Ash-Pollin puts it: "A coding error in the RR working spreadsheet entirely excludes five countries, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, and Denmark, from the analysis. [Reinhart-Rogoff] averaged cells in lines 30 to 44 instead of lines 30 to 49...This spreadsheet error...is responsible for a -0.3 percentage-point error in RR's published average real GDP growth in the highest public debt/GDP category."
[...]
This error is needed to get the results they published, and it would go a long way to explaining why it has been impossible for others to replicate these results. 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.
[h/t Hullabaloo]
