In 2010, two famous economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, released a paper confirming what many fiscally conservative politicians had long suspected: that a country’s economic growth tanks if public debt rises above a certain percentage of GDP. The paper fell on the receptive ears of the UK’s soon-to-be chancellor, George Osborne, who cited it multiple times in a speech setting out what would become the political playbook of the austerity era: slash public services in order to pay down the national debt.
There was just one problem with Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper. They’d inadvertently missed five countries out of their analysis: running the numbers on just 15 countries instead
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