Austerity

The History of a Dangerous Idea

By: Mark Blyth

Narrated by: Fred Stella

Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts - austerity - to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget.

The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

©2013 Oxford University Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Excellent Book

An excellent interesting book about austierity, it's history how we got here today almost sixteen years since the 2008 and how austerity simony increased and empower extreme movements rather than decreasing it that polarization today has more to do with the economic environment and lack of jobs and cutbacks and assessing austierity in many forms an excellent book.

Much needed perspective

I studied business administration and finance in college. While I was there I had a hard time understanding a lot of classical economic ideas.
This book among others like “Debt 5000 the 1st years” really put things into perspective for me.

The focus on austerity is timely and a great frame work to understand other economic ideas of our age.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about classical economics. This is one of few books that helps people outside of the field to navigate the tricky political oceans.

good read boring at times.

lots of information, found it hard to absorb all of it will listen to again.

A good overview

This can get a little hard to follow if you're not up on the last few decades of EU monetary kerfuffles, but the book isn't setting out to be an intro to international monetary policy. I thought his arguments were well laid out and supported with real world case studies, though I'm predisposed to agree with his conclusions. The writing style is accessible and not too dry, and the narrator is pleasant.

Great ideas, terrible voice over talent

Mark Blyth essentially gives these ideas away for free in his numerous YouTube videos on the subject. I had hoped for more content that isn't part of his numerous recorded lectures - this was disappointing in that respect. Also, having watched a number of these videos, Blyth has a distinctive rhythm and tone to his speech, and that comes across in his writing as well. Unfortunately, the narrator, Fred Stella, seems to be doing his best to imitate a machine trying to imitate human speech. He takes an already dense subject and makes it almost unlistenable. Just search for Mark Blyth on YouTube and watch the top five results. You'll get all the same information and hear it in Blyth's inimitable Glaswegian.