To their credit, Alesina and Ardanga fully admit that the case for expectations having their purported powerful effect is “weak,” while acknowledging that devaluations, wage agreements, and several factors other than expectations matter. Yet despite these acknowledged limitations, when the crisis hit, “Tales of Fiscal Adjustment” was seen by anti-Keynesians as the appropriate instruction sheet on how to stop the twelve-month Keynesians discussed in chapter 3 from dominating policy during the bust, and it worked. But what clinched the case in policy circles, especially in Europe, was an update to “Tales” by the same authors written in 2009, especially a version of it Alesina delivered to the ECOFIN (Economic and Financial Affairs Council of the European Council of Ministers) meeting in Madrid in April 2010. … And despite acknowledging in the prior paper that the evidence for such expectations-driven expansions was “weak,” they deploy this explanation here again in full force and with no caveats about its actual explanatory power.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 468