So people really are that stupid:
Austerians have had their worst week since the last time GDP numbers came out for a country that’s tried austerity.
But this time is, well, different. It’s not “just” that southern Europe is stuck in a depression and Britain is stuck in a no-growth trap. It’s that the very intellectual foundations of austerity are unraveling. In other words, economists are finding out that austerity doesn’t work in practice or in theory.
What a difference an Excel coding error makes.
Austerity has been a policy in search of a justification ever since it began in 2010. Back then, policymakers decided it was time for policy to go back to “normal” even though the economy hadn’t, because deficits just felt too big. The only thing they needed was a theory telling them why what they were doing made sense. Of course, this wasn’t easy when unemployment was still high, and interest rates couldn’t go any lower. Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna took the first stab at it, arguing that reducing deficits would increase confidence and growth in the short-run. But this had the defect of being demonstrably untrue (in addition to being based off a naïve reading of the data).
Countries that tried to aggressively cut their deficits amidst their slumps didn’t recover; they fell into even deeper slumps.
Enter Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff. They gave austerity a new raison d’être by shifting the debate from the short-to-the-long-run. Reinhart and Rogoff acknowledged austerity would hurt today, but said it would help tomorrow — if it keeps governments from racking up debt of 90 percent of GDP, at which point growth supposedly slows dramatically. Now, this result was never more than just a correlation — slow growth more likely causes high debt than the reverse — but that didn’t stop policymakers from imputing totemic significance to it. That is, it became a “fact” that everybody who mattered knew was true.
Except it wasn’t. Reinhart and Rogoff goofed. They accidentally excluded some data in one case, and used some wrong data in another; the former because of an Excel snafu. If you correct for these very basic errors, their correlation gets even weaker, and the growth tipping point at 90 percent of GDP disappears. In other words, there’s no there there anymore.
We’re hearing lots of excuses. But, the bottom line is that it benefitted the rich and that was the real reason.
This would be absolutely hilarious if it weren’t so hideously awful.
Yes. They really are. Duh. Only humans are stupid. Only humans are evil. I think that may even be biblical.
I’ve cut and pasted the post to my Congress critters. Unfortunately, economists like Krugman have been jumping up and down with their hair on fire pointing this out for years. Austerians only hear what they want to hear. I’m afraid that the whole point isn’t protecting the economy, it’s victimizing the unrich.
Bought and paid for pols and the running dog Corporatist lackeys hear and remember only what their masters wish them to recall. Or do.
We are not on the radar screens of the pols and lackeys of the Uberwealthy.