"Part of the answer surely lies in the widespread desire to see economics
as a morality play, to make it a tale of excess and its consequences.
We lived beyond our means, the story goes, and now we’re paying the
inevitable price. Economists can explain ad nauseam that this is wrong,
that the reason we have mass unemployment isn’t that we spent too much
in the past but that we’re spending too little now, and that this
problem can and should be solved.
"No matter; many people have a visceral
sense that we sinned and must seek redemption through suffering — and
neither economic argument nor the observation that the people now
suffering aren’t at all the same people who sinned during the bubble
years makes much of a dent."
--Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman (here)
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