When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility
Journal: Perspectives on Politics
Year: 2017

Why do bad policy ideas persist over time? We trace the development of the euro’s governing ideas over fiscal and monetary policy in the face of mounting evidence that continued adherence to those ideas was economically deleterious. We argue that a specific form of social learning, framed by a retrospective recoding in 2010–2012 of Europe’s experience with fiscal rules in 2003–2005, drove European elites to pursue policies that were economically irrational but politically rational. As a result,