How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled || Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman for The New York Review Of books

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Why did austerity economics get such a powerful grip on elite opinion in the first place?
Everyone loves a morality play. “For the wages of sin is death” is a much more satisfying message than “Shit happens.” We all want events to have meaning.


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And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.


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