The voice of Poverty, in Aristophanes’ Plutus (408 BC): Look at the orators in our republics; as long as they are poor, both state and people can only praise their uprightness; but once they are fattened on the public funds, they conceive a hatred for justice, plan intrigues against the people and attack the democracy.…
In spite of much ado about inaccurate calculations in Reinhart and Rogoff’s influential ‘Growth in a Time of Debt’ (e.g. ‘European austerity programmes based on an excel error?’), Matthew Klein at Bloomberg argues that… When it comes to policymaking, this news changes very little: the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was always a flimsy justification for fiscal austerity.…