Dave Strickler | Chris Hedges with Mark Blyth: The Cost of Austerity @DaveStricklers | Uploaded January 2017 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
Originally Published on Sep 10, 2016
On this episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges sits down with economist Mark Blyth to discuss the detrimental ramifications of austerity programs following the 2008 financial crisis. Professor Blyth, author of “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea” addresses the political effects of the spending cuts and considers why the elites will not take responsibility for the fallout. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil examines the impact austerity measures have had on the American working class and the poor since 2008.
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.
About the Author: Mark Blyth is a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute, professor of international political economy in Brown's Political Science Department, and director of the University's undergraduate programs in development studies and international relations.
He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century; editor of The Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy: IPE as a Global Conversation, which surveys different schools of IPE around the globe; and co-editor of a volume on constructivist theory and political economy titled Constructing the International Economy. He is working on a new book that questions the political and economic sustainability of liberal democracies, called The End of the Liberal World?
Blyth is a member of the Warwick Commission on International Financial Reform. He is a member of the editorial board of the Review of International Political Economy, and his articles have appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, and World Politics.
He has a PhD in political science from Columbia University and taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1997 to 2009. His Twitter handle is @MkBlyth
Originally Published on Sep 10, 2016
On this episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges sits down with economist Mark Blyth to discuss the detrimental ramifications of austerity programs following the 2008 financial crisis. Professor Blyth, author of “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea” addresses the political effects of the spending cuts and considers why the elites will not take responsibility for the fallout. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil examines the impact austerity measures have had on the American working class and the poor since 2008.
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.
About the Author: Mark Blyth is a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute, professor of international political economy in Brown's Political Science Department, and director of the University's undergraduate programs in development studies and international relations.
He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century; editor of The Routledge Handbook of International Political Economy: IPE as a Global Conversation, which surveys different schools of IPE around the globe; and co-editor of a volume on constructivist theory and political economy titled Constructing the International Economy. He is working on a new book that questions the political and economic sustainability of liberal democracies, called The End of the Liberal World?
Blyth is a member of the Warwick Commission on International Financial Reform. He is a member of the editorial board of the Review of International Political Economy, and his articles have appeared in journals such as the American Political Science Review, Perspectives on Politics, Comparative Politics, and World Politics.
He has a PhD in political science from Columbia University and taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1997 to 2009. His Twitter handle is @MkBlyth
