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(So Michael Roberts dismisses neo-Keynesianism as a solution to weak capitalist countries like Greece. This would have left Alex Tsipras with only one option, leading a proletarian revolution. This was unlikely for obvious reasons. Syriza was a Eurocommunist party that had no such aims nor the capacity to carry one out. Meanwhile, the rival KKE was all for a proletarian revolution but these sectarian nutters were far more interested in maintaining its ideological purity than building a broad revolutionary movement. So what is to be done?)
But would a reversal of austerity on its own have turned these economies around without the pain of huge cuts in living standards? In the debate, I argued that it would not. The evidence shows that there is little correlation between faster growth and more government spending or bigger budget deficits. Indeed, during the Great Recession and subsequently, many countries with faster economic growth also had low government spending and budget deficits (see the graph below – if austerity causes poor growth, the line should be sharply from bottom left to top right, but it is nearly flat). It seemed that faster economic growth was more dependent on other factors – in particular, more investment and in turn higher profitability.
full: https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/europes-crisis-the-cluj-debate-with-mark-blyth/
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