RERUN
Claim 26

Does high government debt kill growth?

Start hereCritics' code on the authors' data

The study said rich countries with very high government debt stop growing. The Lab retraced it: ✗ different result.

Whose code is this?

Herndon, Ash and Pollin's R code, run on the data Reinhart and Rogoff gave them. It isn't the authors' own code, and the label says so. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged the spreadsheet error in 2013, and said it doesn't change their central message. It's a settled showcase, so there was no forecasting.

See the code

After 2008, politicians pointed to the 90 percent line when they argued for cutting budgets.

Cited by 3,177 studies

What this result means

We test one thing: does this code and data give this number? That's not the same as the science being right. The forecast price never changes the verdict.

See the proof
-0.1% growth a year, the paper says. Counts if between -0.2 and 0.
−0.1%
Reproduced with the original spreadsheet error and choicesThe run printed -0.06206.
2.2%
CorrectedThe run printed 2.168. This fixes the spreadsheet error and also changes which years count and how countries are weighed, as the critics argue it should.

On the acknowledgement: Reuters, 22 April 2013, via Daily FT, The Harvard Crimson, April 2013

Where the number comes fromAverage 1946-2009 4.1 2.8 2.8 -0.1Summary table for advanced economies, last column is 90 percent and above, in the working paper version (NBER w15639)

The exact claim as posted

Does high government debt kill growth? Reinhart and Rogoff said growth averages -0.1% above 90% debt

Reinhart and Rogoff (American Economic Review, 2010) reported that rich countries with public debt above 90 percent of GDP grew by -0.1 percent a year on average. The figure was widely cited in arguments for austerity. This re-runs the code Herndon, Ash and Pollin published, on the authors' own working spreadsheet, without the coding error, the excluded years or the unusual weighting they identified. It's the critics' code, not the authors'.

RERUNCLAIM #0026

Does high government debt kill growth?

Measured in
% growth a year
Paper says
-0.1
Counts if
-0.2 to 0
Lab got
2.168
VerdictDoesn't hold up
fa35d7e5ffd002b0b849Nov 06, 2026

This result is final

Paper said -0.1. We got 2.168.

This slip is the Lab's .

✓ Verified on NEAR. See the contract's history

See the full receipt

  1. People forecast
  2. Forecasting ends
  3. The Lab retraces it
  4. Verdict posted, open to challenge
  5. Winners collect

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.

No forecasting on this claim. It was posted with the result already known.

The evidence

See the full receipt

How much evidence is behind this?

Each step is a tougher test. Only the first one decides who wins the market.

  1. 1. !

    The Lab's retrace of the code and data named in the claim

    The code ran, but the number came out outside the claim's range. NO wins.

  2. 2. –

    Stress test: does the number depend on luck?

    Fetching the extra runs…

  3. 3. –

    Rebuilt from the description (experimental)

    Fetching the AI's rebuild…

Coming next: a data-leakage check, for the same rows in training and test data, and a maths check on the statistics a paper reports. Neither has run on this claim.

Even all three steps can't prove the science is true. They show how well this result stands up to checking.

Verified

Your browser just re-checked these itself, so you don't have to trust this site.

Checking…

What the Lab retraces

Source
https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.573
C. M. Reinhart, K. S. Rogoff; re-analysis by T. Herndon, M. Ash, R. Pollin, CC0-1.0
Code, at this exact version
https://github.com/michaelaoash/HAP-RR-git
commit b9c34472da97465050780dae5a4dab9ab7c69a63
Commands
r4.4
$ mkdir -p /work/.rlib
$ Rscript --vanilla -e "install.packages('plyr', lib='/work/.rlib', repos='https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2022-02-03', Ncpus=2)"
$ sed -n '1,143p;153,236p' RR.R | sed -E '/library\((ggplot2|xlsx|car|gridExtra|reshape2)\)/d;/write.xlsx2/d' > rr_part.R
$ echo 'cat("published_recipe", RR.published.mean[["Above 90%"]], "\n"); cat("above90", RR.correct.mean[["Above 90%"]], "\n")' >> rr_part.R
$ Rscript --vanilla rr_part.R > rerun_output.txt && tail -n 2 rerun_output.txt
Where the result is read
rerun_output.txt using regex above90 (-?[0-9.]+)
Data files
None
Limits
2 CPU, 4 GB, 15 minutes
fa35d7e5ffd002b0b8496bed8020579611c19cef349d5ec4658021a5b04bf3d7
Show the claim exactly as stored on the blockchain
{"artifact":{"commit":"b9c34472da97465050780dae5a4dab9ab7c69a63","data":[],"entrypoint":"Rscript --vanilla rr_part.R > rerun_output.txt && tail -n 2 rerun_output.txt","output":{"extractor":{"expr":"above90 (-?[0-9.]+)","type":"regex"},"path":"rerun_output.txt"},"repo_url":"https://github.com/michaelaoash/HAP-RR-git","runtime":"r4.4","setup":["mkdir -p /work/.rlib","Rscript --vanilla -e \"install.packages('plyr', lib='/work/.rlib', repos='https://packagemanager.posit.co/cran/2022-02-03', Ncpus=2)\"","sed -n '1,143p;153,236p' RR.R | sed -E '/library\\((ggplot2|xlsx|car|gridExtra|reshape2)\\)/d;/write.xlsx2/d' > rr_part.R","echo 'cat(\"published_recipe\", RR.published.mean[[\"Above 90%\"]], \"\\n\"); cat(\"above90\", RR.correct.mean[[\"Above 90%\"]], \"\\n\")' >> rr_part.R"]},"metric":{"comparison":"within_tolerance","name":"average yearly growth above 90% debt, in percent","reported_value":"-0.1","tolerance":{"type":"abs","value":"0.1"}},"private_data":null,"resources":{"cpu":2,"max_minutes":15,"mem_gb":4},"source":{"authors":"C. M. Reinhart, K. S. Rogoff; re-analysis by T. Herndon, M. Ash, R. Pollin","doi":"10.1257/aer.100.2.573","license":"CC0-1.0","type":"paper","url":"https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.2.573"},"statement":"Reinhart and Rogoff (American Economic Review, 2010) reported that rich countries with public debt above 90 percent of GDP grew by -0.1 percent a year on average. The figure was widely cited in arguments for austerity. This re-runs the code Herndon, Ash and Pollin published, on the authors' own working spreadsheet, without the coding error, the excluded years or the unusual weighting they identified. It's the critics' code, not the authors'.","title":"Does high government debt kill growth? Reinhart and Rogoff said growth averages -0.1% above 90% debt","version":1}

Community notes

Notes are people's own words, kept on the blockchain. They never change a verdict, and the Lab's AI never reads them. Posting costs a little NEAR for storage, and what isn't used comes back.