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New York Times Supports Austerity Harshness

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She's a longstanding hardline neoliberal insider. She's well rewarded for inflicting pain. She calls Latvia a success story. Its government sacked a third of its civil servants.

Wages were severely slashed. Benefits largely disappeared. Economic deprivation left vast numbers "severely materially deprived."

Fo ordinary people, crisis conditions persist. Anyone out of work on earning subsistence or sub-poverty pay understands what's going on better than talking-head economists.

Many people left and won't return. They include some of Latvia's best and brightest. Why endure IMF harshness. 

Riga-based Stockholm School of Economics Professor Morten Hansen said Latvia's unusually open economy enabled relentless wage and benefit squeezing.

"You can only do this in a country that is willing to take serious pain for some time and has a dramatic flexibility in the labor market," he said.

In other words, it's only possible where workers have no rights, those most vocal and angry leave, and others know resistance faces stiff crackdowns. It's also easier perhaps in tiny countries. Larger ones are harder to control.

Hansen added that "The lesson of what Latvia has done is that there is no lesson."

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