Code Curiosities

The Spreadsheet That Crashed a Country's Economy

Episode Summary

In 2010, two Harvard economists published a paper that world governments used to justify years of brutal austerity cuts — and the whole thing hinged on a mistake in Microsoft Excel. We dig into how a single copy-paste error became one of the most consequential spreadsheet blunders in history, and what it says about the dangerous gap between the tools we trust and the humans using them.