Zombie Economics

"...so we have the return of these ideas in the form of austerity--[first] these ideas were going to make us better off, now we have the 'there is no alternative' type of narrative: that we have to cut because there is no alternative but to cut... this is backed up by a story of government profligacy that really doesn't stand up to even momentary scrutiny... [For Greece, true...] but the next coutries that have fallen over, for nearly all of them the crisis has risen from two factors: one was the need to spend a vast amount of money bailing out banks and other financial institutions; and the second was a belief prompted by the efficient markets hypothesis that the tax revenues these institutions were generating were reflecting real economic output that therefore would be a sustainable source of revenue into the future... nonetheless this is not being used to suggest that maybe we should be doing something about these financial institutions, but rather that it's the nurses and garbage workers that caused the crisis and therefore they should be made to pay for it."

From this LSE lecture by Professor John Quiggin.