In contrast, deflation, what austerity demands, produces a much more pernicious politics, since any person’s first move of self-protection (taking a pay cut to stay in a job, for example) is actually zero-sum against everyone else’s move (since doing so lowers that person’s consumption and shrinks demand for everyone else). It’s that fallacy of composition again. There are no winners, only losers, and the more you try to win, the worse the outcomes, as the Eurozone periphery has been proving for the past several years.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 47