I’m here to be hated. You wouldn’t be the first one.

Honestly: that was on my mind, to a small degree. But imagine it wasn’t just a funny Excel error. Imagine it was a serious pattern of results over years rather than a single screwup. Imagine you set, or backed up, or bolstered such a thing as the monetary policy of a whole government. Or the social policy. Welfare policy. Can you imagine the untold million small tendrils of misery that would snake out from your work into houses and hearths?