As we shall see in detail below, there have been a very few occasions when austerity has worked for states, but that has happened only when the fallacy of composition problem has been absent, when states larger than the one doing the cutting were importing, and massively so, to compensate for the effects of the cuts. Sadly, for the vast majority of countries, this is not the world we inhabit today.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 49