This, then, is the essence of modern austerity thinking. This is how it emerged. These are the personalities and the politics involved in its production. These are its core claims. It has been astonishingly influential and serves as the contemporary instruction sheet for economic reform in the European Union, and regardless of Obama's 2012 victory, we can most probably expect to see it deployed in the United States too. The only remaining question we need to ask is, does it work? The answer, as we shall see next, is certainly not in the big cases of the past in the 1920s and 1930s, not at all in Europe at the moment, and only very occasionally and under very specialized conditions elsewhere.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 478