Personal Website Pages:
Center for European Studies at Harvard University
The Guardian
Watson Institute International and Public Affairs
Writings/Discussions/Videos:
Baccarro, Lucio, Mark Blyth, and Jonas Potusson. "Beyond Varieties of Capitalism: A Growth Model Approach." UK in a Changing Europe (November 21, 2022) ["Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson explain the concept of national ‘growth models’, drawn from their recent book Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, highlighting how the concept can help us make sense of recent UK economic and political developments."]
Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press, 2013. ["Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013. Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, 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. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, 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. 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 see austerity for what it is, and what it costs us."]
Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford University Press, 2013. ["Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013. Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, 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. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, 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. 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 see austerity for what it is, and what it costs us."]
---. "Eternal Austerity Makes Perfect Sense If You are Rich." The Guardian (November 15, 2013)
---. "Global Markets are No Longer Obeying Economic Common Sense." The Guardian (February 9, 2016)
---. "Global Trumpism." Foreign Affairs (November 15, 2016)
---. Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ["Mark Blyth argues that economic ideas are powerful political tools as used by domestic groups in order to effect change since whoever defines what the economy is, what is wrong with it, and what would improve it, has a profound political resource in their possession. Blyth analyzes the 1930s and 1970s, two periods of deep-seated institutional change that characterized the twentieth century. Viewing both periods of change as part of the same dynamic, Blyth argues that the 1930s labor reacted against the exigencies of the market and demanded state action to mitigate the market's effects by "embedding liberalism" and the 1970s, those who benefited least from such "embedding" institutions, namely business, reacted against these constraints and sought to overturn that institutional order. In Great Transformations, Blyth demonstrates the critical role economic ideas played in making institutional change possible and he rethinks the relationship between uncertainty, ideas, and interests on how, and under what conditions, institutional change takes place. Mark Blyth is an assistant professor of political science at the Johns Hopkins University specializing in comparative political economy. He has taught at Columbia University, and at the University of Birmingham, UK. Blyth is a member of the editorial board of the Review of International Political Economy."]
---. "Sovereigns, Citizens and Suckers." Open Source (September 6, 2011)
---. "State of the Union." Open Source (January 4, 2018) ["The people’s economist Mark Blyth is a perpetual fan favorite for Open Source listeners. The Brown University professor, who never left behind his working-class Scottish roots, brings a vernacular wisdom and wit to his deep analysis of inequality, austerity, and popular unrest. He also often sees what the rest of us tend to miss. In 2016, he predicted both of the year’s major upset victories: the American election of Donald J. Trump as well the British vote for Brexit. You can listen to our own shell-shocked phone call with Blyth just after the Brexit vote here:"]
---. "Sovereigns, Citizens and Suckers." Open Source (September 6, 2011)
---. "State of the Union." Open Source (January 4, 2018) ["The people’s economist Mark Blyth is a perpetual fan favorite for Open Source listeners. The Brown University professor, who never left behind his working-class Scottish roots, brings a vernacular wisdom and wit to his deep analysis of inequality, austerity, and popular unrest. He also often sees what the rest of us tend to miss. In 2016, he predicted both of the year’s major upset victories: the American election of Donald J. Trump as well the British vote for Brexit. You can listen to our own shell-shocked phone call with Blyth just after the Brexit vote here:"]
---. "Whether it’s homes or jobs, our dreams are moving further out of reach every year." The Guardian (September 22, 2021)
Blyth, Mark and Bill Maurer. "Money, Then and Now." On the Media (October 12, 2018) ["Most schoolchildren learn that money arose when barter proved insufficient for meeting everyday trade needs. People required more complex transactions, so they invented currency: a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value. It's a compelling story...but a false one. Instead, most evidence suggests that money arose from recordkeeping — or, as UC Irvine professor Bill Maurer explains to Bob, "in the beginning was not the coin... in the beginning was the receipt." In this segment, Bob speaks with Maurer and Brown University's Mark Blyth about past and present myths about money, and what the history of money might suggest about its future."]
Blyth, Mark and Simon Tilford. "How the Eurozone Might Split." Foreign Affairs (January 11, 2018)
Blyth, Mark and Sylvia Maxfield. "A New Financial Politics?: Introduction." Foreign Affairs (January 22, 2018)
Blyth, Mark, David Kaiser and Vanessa Williamson. "The French Sensation: Income Inequality in 700 Pages and a Hundred Graphs." Radio Open Source (May 1, 2014) ["The hottest book everybody is talking about, that no one has read and no can get their hands on, is a giant, data-packed tome on income inequality covering three hundred years of history by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Is there a reason he’s getting the rock star treatment? Is it the symptoms that resonate (our drift into oligarchy), or is it the cure (a progressive tax on wealth)? Capital in the 21st Century is expected to sell 200,000 copies in the first month. Both The New Yorker and New York have covered the book’s success and Piketty’s whirlwind tour of the States, which is surprising everyone. It’s being praised as a ‘watershed’ entry in economic thought by Paul Krugman."]
Blyth, Mark and Bill Maurer. "Money, Then and Now." On the Media (October 12, 2018) ["Most schoolchildren learn that money arose when barter proved insufficient for meeting everyday trade needs. People required more complex transactions, so they invented currency: a medium of exchange, unit of account and store of value. It's a compelling story...but a false one. Instead, most evidence suggests that money arose from recordkeeping — or, as UC Irvine professor Bill Maurer explains to Bob, "in the beginning was not the coin... in the beginning was the receipt." In this segment, Bob speaks with Maurer and Brown University's Mark Blyth about past and present myths about money, and what the history of money might suggest about its future."]
Blyth, Mark and Simon Tilford. "How the Eurozone Might Split." Foreign Affairs (January 11, 2018)
Blyth, Mark and Sylvia Maxfield. "A New Financial Politics?: Introduction." Foreign Affairs (January 22, 2018)
Blyth, Mark, David Kaiser and Vanessa Williamson. "The French Sensation: Income Inequality in 700 Pages and a Hundred Graphs." Radio Open Source (May 1, 2014) ["The hottest book everybody is talking about, that no one has read and no can get their hands on, is a giant, data-packed tome on income inequality covering three hundred years of history by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Is there a reason he’s getting the rock star treatment? Is it the symptoms that resonate (our drift into oligarchy), or is it the cure (a progressive tax on wealth)? Capital in the 21st Century is expected to sell 200,000 copies in the first month. Both The New Yorker and New York have covered the book’s success and Piketty’s whirlwind tour of the States, which is surprising everyone. It’s being praised as a ‘watershed’ entry in economic thought by Paul Krugman."]
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