Speaker: Prof. Mark Blyth, Brown University
Date: Thursday 23 May 2013
Time: 6.30-8 pm
Location: New Theatre, East Building
Chair: Jonathan Hopkin, Department of Government
Governments in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. 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.
The problem 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. 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” seeks to demolish the conventional wisdom, marshalling an army of facts to demand that we recognize austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.
Speaker biography
Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown University. He is the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.