Donnerstag, 22. November 2012 | 17 Uhr (s.t.)

Austerity: The Intellectual History of a Dangerous Idea

Mark Blyth, Brown University

The debate over austerity as the appropriate economic policy response to the euro crisis continues. Recent warnings by the IMF regarding extremely large negative multipliers on government spending cuts came on top of increasing political resistance to austerity measures throughout the European periphery and European economic data that continue to disappoint. Austerity advocates cite successes in the Baltic states, but close examination reveals them to have been less than successful. In the face of such evidence, why does the policy continue to, as Keynes put it eighty years ago, “dominate the minds of the governing classes of this generation”? A look at the intellectual history of austerity as an economic idea as reflected in the writings of Locke, Hume, Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Schumpeter, and Keynes as well as in ordoliberalism, monetarism, public choice theory and other recent approaches will enable us to answer Keynes’s question.

Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy and faculty fellow of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Providence, USA. He is particularly interested in how uncertainty and randomness impact complex systems, particularly economic systems. He is the author of several books including Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (2002) and, most recently, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2013), which questions the return to prominence of financial orthodoxy following the global financial crisis.