Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is not buying that Austerity is good for us, as he wrote recently that nobody is saying that Ireland is recovering, only that it is “set to recover”. As he says. ” we’ve heard that before, and before, and before”.. He highlights “Ireland’s odd economic structure, in which so much of its reported exports in particular come from companies that add little value in Ireland, means that the usual numbers have to be treated with great caution.
So look: maybe Ireland really is going to recover for real soon; let’s hope so. But the repeated declarations that it is already a success story — this has been going on for at least three years — are just weird.
And yes, it seems obvious to me that Ireland keeps being proclaimed a success because it’s supposed to be a success: they did the austerity thing forcefully, with a minimum of complaints, so there must be a pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, right? “