Does high government debt kill growth?
✗ Doesn't hold up
Counts as holding up
A well-known claim that rich countries with public debt above 90 percent of GDP saw growth fall to -0.1 percent a year was rerun with corrected code and data, and the growth figure came out at 2.168 percent instead.
Reinhart and Rogoff reported in a 2010 economics paper that rich countries with public debt above 90 percent of GDP grew by -0.1 percent a year on average, a figure widely cited in arguments for austerity. Herndon, Ash and Pollin later identified problems in the calculation, including a coding error, excluded years and unusual weighting. This rerun uses the critics' published code on the authors' own working spreadsheet to see what the corrected numbers show.
Running the critics' corrected code on the authors' data produced average growth of 2.168 percent a year for the high-debt group, instead of the -0.1 percent reported in the paper. The check means the original figure does not reproduce when the identified problems are fixed, using the critics' code rather than the authors'. It does not show whether the sample was fair or complete, whether high debt slows growth or slow growth raises debt, or whether the critics' choices about years and weights were the only fair ones.
The text was written by a private AI model on NEAR AI (z-ai/glm-5.3-flash). The verdict and numbers come straight from the blockchain, and the AI can't change them.
- What the paper said
- Average 1946-2009 4.1 2.8 2.8 -0.1. Summary table for advanced economies, last column is 90 percent and above, in the working paper version (NBER w15639)
- What we got
- 2.168
- Whose code ran
- Critics' code on the authors' data
- How well known
- Cited by 3,177 studies
- What forecasters thought
- Nobody forecast this one. We posted it with the result already known, to show how a famous paper looks.
- Proof
- Read the receipt or see claim 26
What we didn't check
- Whether the sample was fair or large enough.
- Whether test data leaked into training or tuning.
- Whether the result holds on new data.
- Whether the study's method was the right one for its question.
- Whether high debt slows growth, or slow growth raises debt.
- Whether the critics' choices about years and weights are the only fair ones.
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