The Strategic Cowardice Of Sidling With The Plutocrats

Paul Krugman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being Right:

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The austerity consensus that took over Washington (and Brussels, and London, and Frankfurt, and …) never actually had many facts behind it to begin with . It flourished through sheer incestuous amplification: the in-crowd reassuring each other that they were right, with journalists — as Ezra himself pointed out — simply adding to the problem:

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions. At Tuesday’s Playbook breakfast, for instance, Mike Allen, as a straightforward and fair a reporter as you’ll find, asked Simpson and Bowles whether they believed Obama would do “the right thing” on entitlements — with “the right thing” clearly meaning “cut entitlements.”

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the same people at the BIS and the OECD are still issuing dire warnings about the dangers of easy money, George Osborne is still making pronouncements,

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OK, I know I’m hyperventilating a bit. But the lack of accountability, for ideas and people, is truly remarkable in a time of massive policy failure.