I think it’s tiresome the way countries in desperate economic trouble are treated as lab rats by pundits far away whose sole interest in their travails lies in their providing an argument to buttress favoured policies back home. It’s a pretty grim game, really. So when Paul Krugman spends a summer writing about Ireland’s enforced austerity he’s not really writing about Ireland at all. He’s arguing about the United States and never mind what the hell happens to the poor, miserable Irish. The worse things go for them, the better they go for the Krugman school. Tyler Cowen documents all this rather neatly.
This doesn’t mean that a return to economic growth in Ireland (while Spain remains sluggish) demonstrates the wisdom of austerity’s advocates. As Megan McArdle says it may be a decade before we can sensibly measure what “worked”.
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