Wednesday 25 April 2012

Austerity in Two Charts

A couple of recent Krugman columns dealing with austerity are of interest.

this one from yesterday, focuses on the US and shows how public sector employment has fallen under Obama save the census spike; Krugman wants to show that while the U.S. is not the focus of much of the talk about austerity, there are austerity measures being implemented here:



and this one from the day before, focusing on Europe and showing a growth/austerity plot:



The mixed messages in his comments illustrate the difficulty in reading that chart, and one of his readers helpfully points us to this xkcd depiction.  But I think he is showing that greater austerity leads to lower GDP growth, so that more austerity translates to a longer/worse recession.  

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