<story><title>Grad Student Who Shook Global Austerity Movement</title><url>http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-who-shook-global-austerity-movement.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dade_</author><text>This story is a lesson on confirmation bias:&lt;p&gt;Professors that immediately decide that the student is wrong, and must be convinced otherwise.&lt;p&gt;The spreadsheet financial analysis that provided the expected results and therefore never checked for errors.&lt;p&gt;A single study that gave economists, and clearly an awful lot of politicians, the confirmation they needed to strengthen their resolve in the face of opposition.</text></comment>
<story><title>Grad Student Who Shook Global Austerity Movement</title><url>http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/grad-student-who-shook-global-austerity-movement.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>iwwr</author><text>So what is the alternative to lowering &quot;consistently high public debt&quot;? Monetize it? Default on it?&lt;p&gt;Debt in itself is not a problem if the growth rate is the same or decreasing as a proportion of the economy. At the current rate, some obligations would have to be forfeited, either to the direct creditors, or to those promised social services. Strangling the economy further with high taxes only makes the problem worse.&lt;p&gt;I think most of the damage from so-called &quot;austerity&quot; has been decisions taken with little warning and at the very last possible moment.</text></comment>