> Nor is this surprising; the reason nobody looked too closely at the numbers is because they agree broadly with every other paper and model out there.
The data Reinhart and Rogoff used hadn't been analysed together before so their work was original, and it got widely cited. The results failed to be reproducible, and now the analysis has been found to have multiple methodological errors, of which the spreadsheet error is just a minor component. Reinhart and Rogoff didn't cause austerity, but they published a high impact paper supporting austerity that has now been discredited. Also, it would be interesting to know how you get the impression that their results "agree broadly with every other paper and model out there".