Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

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UtahOwl
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Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea

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Originally proposed by UtahOwl - Thu Aug 08, 2013 12:05 pm – 37 views before being transplanted here.

By Mark Blyth,Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at Brown University and a Faculty Fellow at Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies. He is also the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. This book is currently available from Amazon for $18.88 (HB) or $9.50 (Kindle).

The KIRKUS REVIEW notes: “Most fascinating is the author's (Author Mark Blyth), discussion of the historical underpinnings of austerity, first formulated by Enlightenment thinkers Locke, Hume and Adam Smith, around the (good) idea of parsimony and the (bad) idea of debt. Ultimately, writes Blyth, austerity is a 'zombie economic idea because it has been disproven time and again, but it just keeps coming.' A clear explanation of a complicated, and severely flawed, idea.”

Paul Krugman reviewed this, with 2 other books, in the NY Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archive ... tion=false on June 6, 2013.

And Larry Summers posted a review on April 12 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/5097537a-a034 ... z2bOvMIhm9 in which he said: “As I have often said, the central irony of financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much lending and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more lending and more spending. This is exactly what is denied by austerity doctrines, and it is precisely the case that [the book] Austerity makes with more wide-ranging depth than any other study I have encountered. This makes it an important if flawed book. Keynes, after all, was the one who said: ‘Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.’”

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