Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 204

an economist with the National Bureau of Economic Research in Wash-
ington, D.C., and the other at Harvard, achieved academic rock star status,
including a lengthy New York Times proile with the breathless headline,
“They Did Their Homework (800 Years of It)” (Rampell 2010). It was
written and talked about in almost every major media outlet. 5 Another
academic rock star, the historian Niall Ferguson, referred to it as “the law
of inance” (Konczai 2013). More importantly, policy makers used the
paper to promote rigid austerity measures because it appeared to demon-
strate that cutting government spending would reverse economic decline
and spur growth. This was a signiicant turn because, from the 1930s
on, governments more or less believed that public spending, especially
on infrastructure and public works, would spur growth, even if it meant
taking on debt. The new research demonstrated something fundamentally
different: once government debt reached the magic ratio of 90 percent of
GDP, the economy shows sharply slower growth rates.
Governments, corporations, and conservative think tanks jumped
on the indings to support, implement, and justify cuts in government
spending even as their economies suffered from what some believed was
inadequate spending. Even when governments continued to experience
economic recession, double-dip and even triple-dip, their leaders held
fast to the magic formula. Then in 2013, Thomas Herndon, a doctoral
student at the University of Massachusetts who had not yet begun work
on his own dissertation found signiicant errors in the original article's
data, thereby calling into question its central indings. As a commentator
described, “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” (Wise
2013). The student was simply trying to replicate the original results for
an econometrics project and could not do so with publicly available docu-
ments, so he contacted the authors and asked for their spreadsheets, which
they provided. He quickly spotted errors in data reporting on national
growth rates and debt levels and published the results (Herndon, Ash,
and Pollin 2013). Eventually the authors of the original piece admitted
to the errors, but stood their ground on austerity policy.
As one might expect, the debate rages, with most governments con-
tinuing to practice austerity even as they change their underlying justii-
cation (Vina and Kennedy 2013). Nevertheless, the implications for big
data are signiicant. Before the errors were detected, critics such as Nobel