COMMENTARY Economic & Political Weekly EPW DECember 28, 2013 vol xlvIiI no 52 17 What’s So Great about Data? A Call to Re-examine the Relationship between Science and Society Andi Schubert The Reinhart-Rogoff controversy shows us why we need to re-examine the relationship between scientific inquiry and society. I n this short article I seek to contri- bute to the debate about an influential paper that has been used to justify the implementation of austerity meas- ures in debt-ridden countries. I attempt to raise a number of questions on the broader implications for knowledge that have been brought into focus due to this debate. The debate in question surrounds a paper written by two internationally recognised scholars in the field of eco- nomics, and debt in particular, who live and work in the United States. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s original paper titled “Growth in a Time of Debt” has been widely used as crucial evidence by advocates calling for austerity mea- sures as a means of stimulating growth in countries with high levels of debt (in economic terms, high debt-to-gross domestic product ( GDP) ratios) (Reinhart and Rogoff 2010). Although widely used by the advocates of pro-austerity mea- sures, Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper had received a great deal of criticism from other economists and analysts. 1 However, in spite of this criticism and numerous attempts to justify their findings, Reinhart and Rogoff’s data had not been made publicly available. That was until Thomas Herndon, a graduate student at the University of Massachu- setts, wrote and obtained the data set used by Reinhart and Rogoff. When he examined the data set, he found that the data used by Reinhart and Rogoff con- tained a number of significant flaws, including the selective exclusion of im- portant data, an unconventional data weightage process as well as a coding error in the excel spreadsheet that results in excluded data. These findings along with their impli- cations for the work of Reinhart and Rogoff were published recently (Herndon, Ash and Pollin 2013). There has been widespread discussion and debate on these findings in academic and journalistic circles, and some have even gone so far as to say that the flaws in the computing and analysis of this data has a significant impact on the scope and validity of the claims made by Reinhart and Rogoff. 2 The focus in many of the debates on these findings has been on the economic and policy fallouts from the austerity measures that have been implemented in a number of countries in Europe. How- ever, in this article I want to turn away from these discussions and instead high- light a number of questions regarding the process and goals of knowledge pro- duction that emerge out of this debate. The Fallout While it is true that Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper is not the clinching argument for the implementation of austerity measures, it is equally true that their paper has played an influential role in decisions about the need for austerity measures in order to stimulate growth. 3 However, much of the debate surrounding the problems with Reinhart and Rogoff’s analysis appears to be limited to academic circles and discussions. For example, after the issue emerged in the media, some analysts have sought to make suggestions as to how this kind of scientific inquiry could be monitored better in order to en- sure that this kind of error does not in- fluence policymaking in the future. 4 It is generally assumed in academic circles that an error such as this would have its own fallout for the researchers in terms of their reputation and would colour all judgments of their work in the future. However, the implementation of aus- terity measures has caused widespread social upheaval and protests across the European Union. The fallout from the financial crisis has also affected countries in the global South, which stand to lose out doubly due to the financial crisis as well as the embedded inequalities in the global financial system. The implications of austerity measures are further com- plicated by the fact that most countries have had to accept them as part of the conditions imposed by foreign econo- mies or donor agencies in exchange for Andi Schubert (andi@ssalanka.org) is a researcher at the Social Scientists’ Association, Sri Lanka.