The interwar period taught us some valuable lessons about why austerity does not work and why its application is a dangerous idea. Building an entire international monetary order with an inherent deflationary bias that can’t work in a democracy is bad idea, number one. Number two, Einstein was right. If doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the definition of madness, then repeated rounds of austerity in country after country was madness. No good came of it. Apart from a few short-term expansions in the early 1920s when countries were not on gold, not only did the application of austerity not work, it made the depression deeper, longer, and, arguably, laid the foundations for the war that would engulf the world in the 1940s.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 555