As I think I’ve mentioned, as part of a longer-term project I’m doing some more work on British austerity — the reality, and, even more important, the perception. It’s a strange story. For the most part, as we look across the advanced world, the intellectual arguments behind the great 2010 turn to austerity have collapsed — you don’t see people invoking invisible bond vigilantes to warn of imminent crisis unless you slash spending, you don’t see them invoking the confidence fairy to deny that spending cuts will hurt output. In fact, as Simon Wren-Lewis notes, you see efforts to rewrite the history and claim that nobody ever said the things they did, in fact, say to justify austerity.

Yet in British public discourse — in what Simon calls “mediamacro” — the old discredited tropes are still alive and well. Supporting them is a narrative that goes like this: the critics of austerity predicted many years of stagnation, but instead we have a boom. Osborne wins!

Simon has taken this myth on many times, but I thought I might try a somewhat different presentation.

First of all, what did anti-austerian prophecies of stagnation really look like? I guess you could say that something like my old post on Osbornia is a fairly good example. In that post I envisaged a government doing something like what the coalition said it was going to do — a sustained tightening of fiscal policy, year after year, over the course of five years — and argued that this would place a sustained drag on growth.

But here’s the thing: That’s not what the coalition actually did. Here are estimates of the fiscal stance — the structural primary balance — from the IMF and the OECD:

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Minor differences aside, these tell a tale not of ever-tighter austerity but rather of two years of sharp tightening followed by a pause. And there should be no surprise — certainly no refutation of the anti-austerity position — to be seeing growth revive during that pause.

Has the growth been way out of line with what you might expect given the reality (as opposed to the rhetoric) of policy? Let me do a slightly different version of the austerity scatterplot I’ve used a lot. Here I look across advanced countries, and compare the annual rate of growth during the austerity era 2009-13 with the average rate of fiscal consolidation (as measured by the IMF). This scatterplot suggests a strong negative impact of austerity, with a multiplier of around 1.5. And I insert British performance in 2014 into that scatter:

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What do we learn from that experience, again?

So the real British story is one in which the government and the news media have misrepresented the actual history both of policy and of policy debates. Academic economists aren’t fooled: they overwhelmingly disagree with the pro-austerity narrative. But the public may never hear about that.