The Hoover administration therefore actively sought not alternatives to austerity, but compliments and palliatives that took the form of voluntary policies to smooth the adjustment of labor and capital to new uses. Those policies were always conceived of as helping adjustment pro-cyclically rather than compensating for it countercyclically. For to do the latter would, Schumpeter warned, “lead to a collapse worse than the one it was called into remedy.”

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 325