If, given the imminent rise of Asia, the world wants to avoid a bleak future, austerity has to be the new global norm. While that suggestion may provoke consternation in many of the world's leading economists, it is still the only way to address global inequalities - which these prominent economists at least profess to care about deeply.
But one should not expect any miracles - or much support, for that matter - from the West, given its politics, ideological biases and sense of entitlement. The West's inability to come to terms with required changes should not put off Asian leaders from understanding the harsh realities ahead.
Asia needs to build its future on austerity because it can - and because it has no choice. That is a simple but inescapable function of the population and resource pressures that shape the fate of this vast continent - and hence the world as a whole.
Asia must reject the largely academic discussion taking place in the West about how to stimulate growth through debt (through the printing of money like there's no tomorrow). Denial of underlying economic realities in the West, and in particular the United States, must not be mistaken in Asia as an apparent search for clever solutions, the finding of which, according to the script, is supposedly only a matter of time.
That is largely a rhetorical device, as the will to reorient the entire economy towards a more resource-preserving economic model (and therefore one in which people live within their means) is unlikely to be accepted in the US in the near future. The truth is that many Americans are indeed too poor but still too resource-demanding for the country to make that turn.
That is why Asia needs to look at building human progress by reshaping capitalism around 'austerity for all'. It is not so much a matter of economic models but of coexisting with resource constraints - and thus global responsibility built around discipline, which is the cornerstone of austerity.
Only this made-in-Asia drive towards austerity can address the needs of a majority of the world's population that at present live beneath any fair definition of 'austerity' in the West. In other words, what is perceived in the West as creating the conditions for social stability pales by comparison to how most people around the world live.