Yup, but the Excel error is the soundbite. Anyone can understand it and it makes the authors look ridiculous, which is so much more potent than just being wrong

Yup, but the Excel error is the soundbite. Anyone can understand it and it makes the authors look ridiculous, which is so much more potent than just being wrong, especially if what you're wrong about is something abstruse that in the end will only get reported as "economists disagree". http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/the-good-glitch/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/the-good-glitch/ I've often wondered about this aspect of political discourse. It's not rational, it's symbolic. Yet most of the time when a symbolic soundbite takes off, even though it's wrong or misleading per se, there's still some poetic justice to it. That is, it's rare that such a soundbite is completely unfair; usually it turns out to be a metonym for an arguably legitimate criticism. This is a case of that. (I'm tempted to cite other examples, carefully balanced in partisan terms, but am scared that even that would provoke political indignation, which, to quote my son from when he was 2, "that what we not do".)