Austerity works in the same way that Keynes maintained classical economics works, as a “limiting point of the possible positions of equilibrium.” That is, one special case out of billions of possible cases. He continued, “The characteristics of the special case assumed … happen not to be those of the economic society in which we actually live, with the result that its teaching is misleading and disastrous if we attempt to apply it to the facts of experience.” Once again, what we learned in the 1930s has been forgotten. That forgetting is perhaps the strongest reason why austerity remains such a dangerous idea.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 480