The Success of Austerity in Spain: The Soft Bigotry of Incredibly Low Expectations

Paul Krugman rightly criticizes the proponents of austerity for claiming Spain as a success story. As Krugman points out, its economy is growing, but it has a long way to go to make up the ground lost in its downturn.

He makes this point in a graph showing log GDP, but this picture is actually too generous. We should care about GDP per capita, and here the story is even worse.

Spain's per capita GDP is still more than 7 percent below its peak in 2007. In fact the current level is roughly the...