The tension between these two viewpoints—can’t live with it, can’t live without it—generates a concern with how states should fund themselves, and it is this concern that creates the conditions for the emergence of austerity as a distinct economic doctrine when states become large enough budgetary entities in their own right to warrant cutting: that is, by the 1920s. When that happens, austerity appears in its own right as a distinct economic doctrine.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 270