Evolution of austerity

Austeritynerd

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary voted 'Austerity' as its' Word of the Year in 2010, stating that it has been around since the 14th century. I found this incredible, yet difficult to track down its evolution since then.


I wonder what Austerity meant in the 14th century?
Did it evolve with each new century?
What did Austerity mean prior to the 2008 global financial crisis?
What did it mean after 2008?
Has it once again evolved 5 years after the crisis?

Opinions very much appreciated.

andrew

Austerity isn't an Economic term per se; are you wondering when it was first used in the way it's used today - as another word for reduced government expenditure?

nesf

It's a rather old word descended from older words still in Latin and French: http://machaut.uchicago.edu/?resource=Webster%27s&word=austerity&use1913=on

If you have a look around you'll find various views on it. If you've access to a library they may have the full or Shorter Oxford English Dictionary that will give you more detail than the above.

Black Swan

I recently read an interesting article by Boyer, R. (2012), "The four fallacies of contemporary austerity policies: the lost Keynesian legacy," Cambridge Journal of Economics, 36 (1): 283-312. It examined a few fallacies associated with the "one-size fits all" government austerity polices adopted by several nations, as well as comparing and contrasting public sector lax spending policies vs the private sector credit speculative booms. It may be useful towards answering some of your pre- and post-2008 questions.

Austeritynerd

andrew wrote: »

Austerity isn't an Economic term per se; are you wondering when it was first used in the way it's used today - as another word for reduced government expenditure?

Pretty much, in reference to when it was first used in the way it's used today, reduced government expenditure.

Thank you for your opinions and suggestions!

andrew

I did a quick search using Google Scholar, and the earliest reference I can find to the phrase 'austerity policy' is (I think) this paper from 1945. I'm not entirely sure, because as this search result shows Google can sometimes mistakenly date articles.

Google also has a cool thing called an 'ngram' viewer; When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.

This is the graph for 'austerity policy'



There's a little bump around 1880, which perhaps corresponds to the Long Depression, but it's a bit weird that it's not mentioned after that. I'd imagine that it's use is pretty dependant on the existence of centralised economic policy/management, and so that probably explains why it didn't appear earlier. The post WWII bump seems to make sense , since Macroeconomics and Government economic management really took off as a thing at around this time. It also corresponds well with the Google scholar search.

Here are some other Ngram searches which seem to confirm that the 'austerity policy' phrase above is related to economics and not some other use of the word that I can't think of:



Above is a search for the word 'austerity,' to confirm that the first graph above doesn't just reflect the use of the word 'austerity.'



Here's a search for 'economic austerity,' which seems to correspond to the first graph.



Here's a search for every time the word 'austerity' modifies the word 'economic.' It seems like it'd be a good indicator for when it's used in the context you're looking for, but I don't fully understand it. It looks to have a similar general trend to the first graph, but with some more mentions after 1880 and before the 1940's.


Hope this helps.

nesf

The issue there Andrew is that Austerity is both a common word easily applied to economic policy using the common meaning and a very specific term used for a particular combination of spending cuts and tax increases in the face of a recession solely to control public debt levels and the deficit which we see later. Your searches will capture both as there's no unusual common term for the latter that we could search for that would exclude the former.

Austeritynerd

andrew wrote: »

I did a quick search using Google Scholar, and the earliest reference I can find to the phrase 'austerity policy' is (I think) this paper from 1945. I'm not entirely sure, because as this search result shows Google can sometimes mistakenly date articles.

Google also has a cool thing called an 'ngram' viewer; When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.

This is the graph for 'austerity policy'



There's a little bump around 1880, which perhaps corresponds to the Long Depression, but it's a bit weird that it's not mentioned after that. I'd imagine that it's use is pretty dependant on the existence of centralised economic policy/management, and so that probably explains why it didn't appear earlier. The post WWII bump seems to make sense , since Macroeconomics and Government economic management really took off as a thing at around this time. It also corresponds well with the Google scholar search.

Here are some other Ngram searches which seem to confirm that the 'austerity policy' phrase above is related to economics and not some other use of the word that I can't think of:



Above is a search for the word 'austerity,' to confirm that the first graph above doesn't just reflect the use of the word 'austerity.'



Here's a search for 'economic austerity,' which seems to correspond to the first graph.



Here's a search for every time the word 'austerity' modifies the word 'economic.' It seems like it'd be a good indicator for when it's used in the context you're looking for, but I don't fully understand it. It looks to have a similar general trend to the first graph, but with some more mentions after 1880 and before the 1940's.


Hope this helps.

Great visualisations! Thank you so much for your point of view, this has certainly given me a lot to think about.

Rightwing

Black Swan wrote: »

I recently read an interesting article by Boyer, R. (2012), "The four fallacies of contemporary austerity policies: the lost Keynesian legacy," Cambridge Journal of Economics, 36 (1): 283-312. It examined a few fallacies associated with the "one-size fits all" government austerity polices adopted by several nations, as well as comparing and contrasting public sector lax spending policies vs the private sector credit speculative booms. It may be useful towards answering some of your pre- and post-2008 questions.

Sounds like an interesting read, must get it.

Did they offer alternatives to the 'one size fits all' ? That's the problem, austerity as we know it is used as a desperate measure, rather than a useful tool.