But, in the face of mounting evidence that they are on the wrong track, the proponents of austerity have been encouraged to stick to their guns by the work of two highly regarded Harvard economists. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper called Growth in a Time of Debt in 2010 which purported to show that a country with international debts equal to 90 per cent or more of its national output would suddenly see a sharp fall in its growth rate.
For those countries with high levels of debt (and we are one of them), the lesson was clear. If they are to grow and escape recession, they must reduce debt.
Reinhart and Rogoff's paper became the favourite reading of US Republicans (particularly Paul Ryan, their vice-presidential candidate), and this goes a long way to explaining the difficulties President Barack Obama has had in persuading Congress to support his counter-recessionary strategy. It wasn't just on paper that Reinhart and Rogoff peddled their message; they appeared before a House Committee and assured legislators that, far from stimulating the economy, it was essential to start cutting immediately.
The European Union economic policy chief, Olli Rehn, presiding over the worsening economic performance across the eurozone, is another enthusiast; and the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, in a Britain that has lost its top credit rating and has only just escaped a triple dip recession, is another to take comfort from the support offered by Reinhart and Rogoff's research, which he is fond of citing.
But the story has now taken an unexpected turn. A young graduate student at Massachusetts University Amherst, Thomas Herndon, was required to replicate Reinhart and Rogoff's research. He was downcast to find that, try as he might, he could not. The young man finally discovered the truth; the research was vitiated by fundamental errors. With the help of two senior colleagues he published the results of his work and created a sensation which is still reverberating around the world.
The catalogue of mistakes is shocking. Reinhart and Rogoff had omitted through an oversight some of the key data; they had capriciously given excessive weighting to minor factors that had skewed the results; they had assembled statistics in bands so as to suggest there were tipping points (such as a 90 per cent debt to GDP ratio) that were in fact artificially constructed; and even if their conclusions had survived these errors, they had hardly considered the possibility that any correlation between high debt and growth rates might have shown that slow growth produced high debt rather than the other way around.
What this means is that policies that have kept millions out of work, condemned many to continuing poverty, destroyed a number of European economies and weighed down the whole global economy have been based on sloppy research and political prejudice.
But it seems unlikely the architects of austerity will be deterred. They will go on crucifying the poor and vulnerable, even in the face of practical and theoretical evidence that they are mistaken.
Even Paul Ryan, Olli Rehn and George Osborne, however, cannot match Bill English and John Key for insouciance. Our government remains committed to austerity; it does not see the need to acknowledge, let alone concede, that the intellectual underpinnings of the policies they are pursuing have been shown to be without foundation.
It is little comfort to our unemployed (still at historically high levels) and disadvantaged that they can make common cause with millions of other victims around the world of what looks increasingly like a cruel deception.
Bryan Gould is a former Waikato University vice-chancellor and UK Labour Party MP.
