Ahead of the elections in Britain, The Guardian offers a lengthy article by Paul Krugman against economic austerity in the country, but it applies across much of the European Union. Advertised as the long read, a regular feature in the newspaper, the article is actually the Nobel laureate’s essay divided into four so-called chapters. “The Austerity Delusion” is the title. Counting five-thousand and four-hundred words, the long read was not to my taste, and thus I skimmed it only. All I was interested in was Krugman’s treatment of John Maynard Keynes. To my delight, he quotes Keynes in the very first chapter: “The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury.” Exactly. Simply put, governments should spend in slumps and save in booms. This has turned out to be the right policy during the Great Depression, and it should have been the right policy during the Great Recession, as the current economic crisis is often called—quite wrongly, for it is nothing if not another depression. Although Krugman mentions Keynesian economics and Keynesian policies in the remaining chapters, he fails to do justice to Keynes’ argument about spending and saving in slumps and booms, respectively. The proof of the argument from 1937, when Keynes penned the above words, is that the Great Recession is still with us. And Krugman could have hammered his argument about the austerity delusion in three-hundred words at most. The long fucking read is but a waste of time.