WELL, THAT HARSHES THE NARRATIVE: New numbers suggest that maybe neoliberalism worked, after all. “Easterly doesn’t actually try to establish causality, which is hard to do in almost any study, but is especially difficult here because good cross-country data on privatization, deregulation, tax reform, trade liberalization and so on don’t exist. Instead he looks at whether obvious economic pathologies such as high inflation, deeply negative real interest rates, high premiums in currency black markets, and so on have become more or less common. And he then looks for any correlation with changes in economic growth rates. Not to destroy the suspense but it turns out that all these pathologies are now much rarer than they used to be. That’s good news worth celebrating all on its own. But it’s also true that countries where the pathologies are down have seen increases in the growth rate of per capita real income of a per cent and a half on average. Now it could be that growth eliminated the pathologies rather than vice versa — there probably is a virtuous circle in such things — but the timing is also consistent with Washington consensus policies having had more of an effect than economists thought.”

Remember, the leftist definition of “broken” is “not giving us more power.”