One of the most famous lines attributed (incorrectly) to Milton Friedman is "there is no such thing as a free lunch." In other words, growth is always costly in some respect, which is generally true. But an offshoot of the public choice literature developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s sought to indirectly challenge that truism by demonstrating that a free lunch of sorts is possible if the government forgoes dinner. That is, you can cut your way to growth while reducing your debt. At the same time, then, that the IMF was proving that such expansionary cuts do not actually work in practice by implementing Washington Consensus economics throughout the developing world, a whole new literature began to spring up proving that, despite such evidence, expansionary cuts do work, at least in theory, and at least in the developed (OECD) world.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 446