High debt-to-GDP austerity arguments based on bad math

A blog in Beat The Press by Dean Baker, co-director of the Centre for Economics and Policy Research, reveals that the debt-means-slow-growth argument relied on questionable figures. A recent University of Massachusetts study reveals that, in fact, the opposite may be true — high debt-to-GDP ratios are because of economic troubles. The Reinhart and Rogoff book that has so influenced austerity-bent governments in recent years contains, it turns out, computational and transcription errors.