Imagine the following:

10 racers at the starting line. The received wisdom is to race well, you must drink electrolytes. Instead, contrary to that received wisdom, their trainer hands them water. On the side, the issuer of received wisdom scoffs.

There's no whistle, just somebody softly says "go." They start at slightly different times, but at 40 seconds 9 have crossed the finish line, although some just barely reached it. They have different times, so faster, some slower than their usual. Maybe it's in seconds, maybe they're rated by how they ran against their average, maybe they're rated in m/s but they all ran slightly different distances. It was an odd track.

One runner decided he wasn't going to race because he didn't get his electrolytes. He stood there and yelled for the first 25 seconds, and continued to yell as he walked backwards down the track--which was, unfortunately, the longest. He was thirsty, and finally he drank the water and headed off. His time was much, much longer, and he also had the longest to go. At 45 seconds he wasn't half-way down the track yet.

On the sidelines, the dispenser of received wisdom said at 45 seconds, "See, I said you needed to give him electrolytes to run well! If you don't drink electrolytes, there's no way you can run this race."

For the EU countries, the time line matters. Everybody expected a slump after 2009; they expected austerity to hurt. They expected there to be a recovery. Greece started late and balked along the way. Starting the time line in 2009 is when the troubles started; but some sort of reasonable concluding time is necessary. Otherwise a country that waited 4 years will be compared with a country that waited 4 days. That's buried in the assumptions. A fairly typical way is to compress the timeline and offset it to show the start of implementation versus how far along they are to implementing the package, comparing apples and apples.

The seriousness of the problems also matter. Those countries that had the biggest problems would have the largest ensemble of austerity measures and would be expected to still have the biggest problems. However, some countries with fairly serious problems implemented and recovered already. We must ignore those. They falsify our theory, so they simply aren't. Those are the countries with austerity measures implemented but with positive growth. But still, we bury that in the assumptions--and ignore the counterevidence because, well, it's not a science so we don't have to deal with falsifying our theory. (At least he says his ideas failed a few months ago; he's forgotten the false predictions from before. Again, econ is dismal at being a science: You can't easily falsify a theory because it's so complex and so much data is cherry picked before dredging you can't get through all the underbrush.)

Baseline matters, as well. If you were struggling before the 2009 crash then "recovery" won't be to 5% GDP growth; the proper measure might be 1%. Instead we have a one-size fits all. That's buried in the assumptions.

Now, with all the assumptions made explicit and taken into account, Krugman may just be right. However, like a preacher sermonizing in front of the choir, Krugman finds his own authority appealing and counts on everybody else doing the same. (Sadly, I missed out on that gene. I find few appeals to authority to be worth paying attention to unless they include, explicitly, all the accoutrements that would make the appeal to authority utterly irrelevant. I accept such appeals provisionally, provided that the authority has a decent track record--not a "selective track record," but the full track record.)

(1) Imposed austerity conditions made it economically impossible to for Greece to fix its problems, hence their own initial blunders were made much much worse, instead of better. Once austerity measures were imposed, there was no decision Greece could make that would work.

(2) Starting from where they are now, the only way for Greece to rebuild its economy is to exit the Euro.

Notice that neither of these is a moral statement. They are claims of what is economically feasible or infeasible. Krugman has been laying out his reasoning in all of his blog posts. If you have a critique of his reasoning, feel free to share it on this thread.