I'd say his paper was a convenient excuse for people who wanted to do austerity anyway. I mean, no government, with a sophisticated civil service department, including a ministries of finance and central banks packed to the brim with economists and statisticians should do anything based on a paper they didn't reproduce (all the data was public too).
I used to be the equivalent of one of those guys when I was a staffer - we don't actually do that much cross verification or due dilligence in that manner (aside from the guys at the CRS doing god's work - would have loved to work there).
One of the things to learn is that a lot of "think tank" content (including those at affiliated departments at universities) is just thought leadership used to drive an agenda. I've been guilty of doing that, and so is everyone else.
I sympathise, I would possibly do the same thing, but you can't then turn around and say "we did X because someone made a spreadsheet that told us so".
Kinda. In these kinds of roles, you're basically making executive decisions every couple hours. You don't have much time to think deeply when you need to execute asap, so you take what info you have and make a call.
It's a skill that helped me in Eng, Product, and VC roles, but it gets stressful very quick.
I think you may overestimate the abilities of our leaders. The guy who brought austerity to the UK, George Osborne was kind of a mediocre journalist with a second class degree in history and never much training or depth of understanding in economics.
I'm reminded of:
>John Maynard Keynes once said: “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I mean not quite that but people who don't understand economics tend to pick up on something they read without great discernment. See for example Trump and deficits and tariffs.
