COPENHAGEN All over Europe, budgets are being pared as a new age of austerity takes hold. Defense expenditures are proving to be the easiest of targets.

But, since then, the IMF has steadily pared its economic projections. Indeed, this year s expected GDP growth rate of 3.3 which was revised downward in the most recent WEO will probably not be met.

PRINCETON In April 2010, the International Monetary Fund s World Economic Outlook offered an optimistic assessment of the global economy, describing a multi speed recovery strong enough to support roughly 4.5 annual GDP growth for the foreseeable future a higher pace than during the bubble years of 2000 2007. But, since then, the IMF has steadily pared its economic projections.

At its heart lies the belief that all government spending above a necessary minimum is wasteful. Europe has its own Tea Party crackpots who loathe the welfare state and want it abolished or radically pared, and who are convinced that all state sponsored capital spending is a boondoggle just so many roads, bridges, and railway lines to nowhere that soak up their money in corruption and inefficiency.

The die was cast for India s development path on July 22, 1947, when India s Constituent Assembly resolved to replace Mahatma Gandhi s spinning wheel, or charka , with the emperor Ashoka s wheel of dharma on the Indian national flag. The move symbolically rejected what the incoming government abandoned upon assuming office Gandhi s vision of an equitable and sustainable agrarian society based on self sufficient, pared down consumption.