Some time ago, I heard a story of CS and Econ professors having lunch together. The Econ professor was excited that Excel was going to release a version that blew out the 64k row limit. The CS professor nearly choked on his lunch.
Dependence on Excel has definitely caused bad papers to be published in the Econ space, and has had real world consequences. There was a paper years ago that stated that once a country’s debt gets above 120% of GDP, its economy goes into a death spiral. It was passed around as established fact by the sorts of politicians who justify austerity. Problem was, nobody could reproduce the results. Then an Econ undergrad asked the original author for their Excel spreadsheet, and they found a coding error in the formulas. Once corrected, the conclusion disappeared.
Some time ago, I heard a story of CS and Econ professors having lunch together. The Econ professor was excited that Excel was going to release a version that blew out the 64k row limit. The CS professor nearly choked on his lunch.
Dependence on Excel has definitely caused bad papers to be published in the Econ space, and has had real world consequences. There was a paper years ago that stated that once a country’s debt gets above 120% of GDP, its economy goes into a death spiral. It was passed around as established fact by the sorts of politicians who justify austerity. Problem was, nobody could reproduce the results. Then an Econ undergrad asked the original author for their Excel spreadsheet, and they found a coding error in the formulas. Once corrected, the conclusion disappeared.