Tag Archives: mark blyth

Book Review: Austerity: the history of a dangerous idea

Mark Blyth delivers a masterful, blistering, devastating, and totally convincing critique of austerity in his book Austerity: the history of a dangerous idea. It’s impossible to read this book and still believe that austerity is the right policy. Blyth writes engaging, powerful economic history of economies applying austerity, including the US, UK, Sweden, Germany, Japan and France in the 1920s and 1930s, Denmark and Ireland in the 1980s, and the Baltic states in 2008, demonstrating in each case that austerity does not work. It does not generate growth or reduce debt. He shows that the current hot spot crises …

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  • Mick Taylor
    Actually what is really needed is fearless politicians, unafraid to make difficult decisions. What we have seen over many years is vacillation and u-turns. In t...
  • cim
    @David Allen I think the key - for electoral communications, at least - is to skip the description of the process entirely and go straight to the outcome. Yo...
  • David Warren
    The last sentence sums up it for me. We are getting squeezed out in the majority of constituencies and the beneficiaries of the progressive protest vote are the...
  • Alex Macfie
    "those on the left don’t tend to see individuals but see people as members of identity groups," so do many on the Right, using "identity groups" to divide peo...
  • Jana
    My son-in-law is a police officer. He tells me that there is no point arresting shop-lifters as they always get bailed and will be shop-lifting again within the...