Just because I didn't point out every detail that was wrong with that post doesn't mean anything else is right. Even the basic facts are wrong.

> 1. Paper came far after the idea of cutting government spending, so causation is wrong off the bat, as OP gently pointed out.

This just isn't true.

The Greek crisis started in 2009, the paper came out in Jan 2010, harsh austerity measures were imposed on Greece in May 2010 by the EC/ECB and then they just kept coming for years on end. The timeline works perfectly and the EC/ECB had not imposed such measures before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_debt_crisis

> 2. The aspect of the treaty doesn't have a clear enforcement mechanism, yes. However, it was a major part of many countries actions at the time.[1]
>
> 3. "What are they going to do, kick me out?" doesn't obviate rules without a clear enforcement mechanism.

Let's talk about 2 and 3 at the same time.

This just isn't how the EU works. And it isn't how laws work. Laws don't rely on a strict interpretation of a text. Laws are not computer programs.

When someone says something is a "rule", they mean that it is a principle that must be followed "one of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere."

The 3% is not a rule. The EC does not see it as such. The member governments who routinely go over the 3% level don't see it as such. It's misleading to call it a rule.

If you really want to know how it works, you could start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixpack_(EU_law)

The Stability and Growth Pact (SPG) is the official mechanism for dealing with this. At the moment the SPG is suspended wholesale.

Never in its history has the SPG ever imposed sanctions on any country for violating the 3% deficit to GDP ratio. It would be unthinkable for it to do so. Germany and a few other countries have been trying to reform the system for a long time to give the SPG teeth and turn that 3% level into an actual rule, but without any success.

These are not rules. If you want to call them that, you're misleading yourself and any reader.

> 4. It's unclear why Greece electing a far right party at some point in the 2010s is enough to motivate the argument, it has a liberal technocratic government and has turned things around substantially, in fact, recent elections delivered an unexpectedly wide reelection victory.

I said that austerity led to the far right getting elected into parliament. Which Golden Dawn did, and far right parties continue to win seats even today at lower levels. I'm not sure what this argues? That Greece is not a fascist state today? I never said that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(Greece)

> n.b. On a personal note, I found the tone you're adopting surprising and not the conduct I'm familiar with after 14 years on HN. What stood out was making personal attacks in response to innocuous comments by interluctors, and the aggressive insistence that they don't understand -- dang has a wonderful shibboleth, "come with curiosity", and I don't see that here. I see someone berating other people for engaging at all because it feels like they're questioning you. If it's the case you are 100% wedded to the idea two Harvard professors created "austerity", it's not worth saying anything at all, it's ill-defined and there's a 1000 ways to read "austerity", 999 of them may conflict with however you are internally defining it.

I never said they created austerity.

On a personal note, I find the contempt for facts and scholarship on HN quite amazing. All of this information is available on Wikipedia. From the timeline, to the fact that the EU does not consider this a binding rule, to Golden Dawn getting elected as a consequence of austerity. To the fact that I'm not "internally defining" austerity, it's an actual field of study in economics.

"come with curiosity", and I don't see that here ~> On this we agree. Curiosity would involve a quest to find out what the truth is.