Despite their finding German homes and American pied-à-terres, appreciating why these decidedly local ideas were able to spring to global prominence in the current crisis requires an engagement with what I term austerity's enablers: broader ideological and institutional shifts that bit-by-bit brought austerity back to the status of economic common sense after it had been relegated so decisively to the status of old-time religion. … They were part of a much broader intellectual shift in economics and economic policy worldwide that was part and parcel of the tearing up of the Keynesian instruction sheet in the 1970s. It is the rise of these neoliberal ideas that enabled the return of austerity as the commonsense thing to do in a slump. Remove these ideas from the intellectual fossil record and it is impossible to jump from the battered and isolated state pro-austerity ideas found themselves in by the 1960s to their modern instantiations.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 406