Foto: Andrejs Strokins, F64.
Latvia is a country where crime is rife because of police budget cuts, where people kill themselves, kill each other or just mow each other down on the street because of excessive drinking. And it is all caused by austerity, you know!
At least that is what readers of the Financial Times are told when they read this piece by professors Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers, both from the USA. They should know because, as they write "Yet few of the enthusiastic commentators [favouring austerity/seeing austerity as successful in Latvia] have spent enough time in the country to understand what happened", implying that they certainly know better.
Yet they don't - looking at the data, the first place one should look, provides a rather different picture. Allow me to show that with some graphs and make some conclusions at the end.
