If anything, they have encouraged austerity budgets, tough-talking central bankers and countries such as the UK that thumb their nose at co-ordinated responses to declining global growth.
Will they encourage growth over austerity to avert further calamity?
While Edsall may be right that scarcity and austerity encourage conservative, backlash politics, it's worth recalling how the previous "era of limits" came to an end: Jimmy Carter's dour projections were supplanted by Ronald Reagan's affable, optimistic "morning in America".
These austerities encourage the impression that one is watching life as it happens, and force the viewer to make sense of scenes and relationships glimpsed in medias res.
Furthermore, eminently respectable economists now argue persuasively that austerity in a deeply depressed economy may well be self-defeating, so that backing off such austerity should encourage, not worry, bond investors.
Although austerity may encourage authorities to cut facilities within jails, it also makes it easier for advocates of liberal prison policies to be heard.
Without a shift in Washington to encourage growth over "damaging" austerity, he added, not only would the middle class shrink, but in turn, contentious issues like trade, climate change and immigration could become harder to address.
The figures sound healthy and, in times of austerity, encouraging.
Cameron's government, for example, has cannily steered the domestic transparency agenda to support its politics of austerity, encouraging citizens to "join the hunt for government savings" and "root out waste" – perhaps not a priority for local citizen groups fighting to protect frontline public services.
The best way of achieving their policy (and they are going about it in terms of the austerity programme) is to encourage people, including those born in Britain, to leave.
