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This is mostly a very good article by Jared Bernstein, but I have a bone to pick with him — namely, over his association of austerity mania with the "old economics" 1/ vox.com/policy-and-pol…
If you didn't follow that dispute at the time, you might think that the obsession with budget deficits at a time of mass unemployment was Econ 101, and that new ideas have refuted that case 2/ 
But that's not at all what happened. Econ 101 said that slashing spending in a depressed economy was a terrible idea. To justify their actions, policymakers had to *reject* standard macroeconomics and leap onto unorthodox theories 3/
Instead, policymakers rushed to embrace Alesina and Ardagna, with their doctrine of expansionary austerity, and Reinhart-Rogoff, with their claim of a critical debt threshold at 90% of GDP. These were unorthodox, innovative ideas — and totally wrong 4/
So blaming "old economics" for austerity is really unjust to the economics profession, and too complimentary to policymakers. If policy had followed professional orthodoxy, the world would be in much better shape 5/
