I love this story that appeared in the Financial Times today. It's motto is something I've always suspected, that far from being run by evil geniuses, the control of the planet is in the hands of people who are just as stupid the rest of us. 
Harvard professors Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart wrote an influential paper in 2010 called "Growth in a Time of Debt," which found that economies with ratios of public debt to gross domestic product above 90% tend to contract about 0.1% annually.
This paper scared the pants off many governments which at the time were struggling to get back on track after the financial crisis, often by taking on more debt. The paper was used to justify the austerity policies which are now in place in most Western economies, and was citied by many famous politicians including congressman Paul Ryan and Britain's George Osbourne.
Well to cut a long story short, these Harvard guys got their sums wrong. The paper was 'riddlled with errors'. For example, the spreadsheet used to prepare the stats in the paper had an incorrect formula so the magic figures on which they based their conclusions were just plain wrong.
The errors were identified in a new paper, by University of Massachusetts Amherst economics doctoral student Thomas Herndon and professors Michael Ash and Robert Pollin. They claim Reinhart and Rogoff were wrong in concluding that a high level of public debt dooms an economy to a long period of slow growth.
So that's just great. We're all under the economic cosh, government spending slashed, everyone's out of work and all because a couple of college boys are crap at Excel!
Link to the full FT article