Austerity comes from the Greek word “austeros,” connoting harsh, bitter, astringency. The first instance of the word to mean fiscal discipline was in 1937, when John Maynard Keynes admonished a fretful President Roosevelt that “the boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.”

That view appears to have changed slightly, in the sense that now austerity, even during “the boom,” is suspect. Paul Krugman said, “Slashing government spending destroys jobs and causes the economy to shrink”; Joseph Stiglitz warned that austerity “doesn’t work; it does not lead to more efficient, faster growing economies.”

In an excellent recent book, What Went Wrong with Capitalism?, Ruchir Sharma notes that the standard narrative describing neoliberalism is the systematic “gutting” of government programs, and the imposition of “austerity.” But Sharma goes on to note that the important question is not whether austerity “works,” but whether it even happened.

Sharma is right to ask. With apologies to Musa al-Gharbi, we have never been austere.

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