Smart Talk: Mark Blyth - Economic Austerity Cures Nothing
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In this lively edition of Smart Talk, Andrew Mazzone discusses the dismal past, dismal present and dismal future of austerity as an economic policy for growth with Mark Blyth. Dr. Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, shows how austerity created the disasters of the 1930s, contributed to the descent of the world into global war and has strangled economic recoveries in Greece and around the globe. Your economy could be next! Mark Blyth is 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. His interdisciplinary research draws from political science, economics, sociology, complexity theory and evolutionary theory. Dr. Blyth is also the author of Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. The Henry George School of Social Science regularly posts the latest Smart Talk, a series of discussions with leading economists around the world, moderated by Andrew Mazzone, president of the HGSSS board of trustees. We invite you to watch the Smart Talk videos featuring some of the most talked-about economic and social thinkers of our times. To see more, please visit: http://hgsss.org/smart-talk/
Comments
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13:00 -- Poor fellow. He looks like he just lost something.
-- All you need to do is raise taxes on the rich and not let them off the hook for the taxes they owe. All you need to do is compel the rich to pay their fair share. They don't even need to be not-rich. We just have to return to 1950 or 1960 or even 1970 tax rates. Instead of having 148 billion dollars, six members of the Waltons can only have, say, 74 billion dollars. If we really want to go for it, let's knock them down to 30 billion. Five billion each.
We have deficits because the rich don't like paying their taxes, which is their fair share, btw. That's pretty much it. -
This was a great discussion! Enough disagreement to be productive without being hostile. Excellent!
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Definitely too far into this Greek tragedy for Greece to profit from the play's moral - never EVER surrender your currency's sovereignty.
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Mr Blyth seems a lot more negative nowadays than the earlier video's I've seen, back then he'd talk about how things would change, how the tax paradises might even get invaded and a return to higher taxes for the rich etc. He seems a lot more pessimistic about any of that now.
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Makes perfect common sense: if you have no money, borrow as much as you can & just consume. This will turn you into a wealthy person
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You said yourself: the Greeks had no plan B. This type of NOT leading the Greek nation (aka brinkmanship) is exactly why the EU needs to extort them by austerity into doing useful stuff (ie reforms). And on top of that: leaving the EURO would have had even harsher austerity as a consequence. It seems you are not even aware of the massive structural support funds flowing from the EU into Greece.
And the reason why you have such dumb voters in the US (esp outside the big cities), well, look at the education costs, education quality (if the private medical system is any indication) and the fact that you are allowed to school your children at home.............. and btw FOX News has a median viewer age of 68. It seems the most radical/idiotic/easy to convince voters are also the most participating: if you think Obama is Hitler, you definitely are going to vote. Smear campaigns, media circus, missing media regulations, money in politics, all play a large role. And in the end, the voters aren't THAT dumb. Often only 2% of the voters who elected a president or sth actually want the associated programs -- usually they just hope "their" candidate is the lesser evil and eventually ends up changing NOTHING AT ALL. It's a matter of missing alternatives. -
Congratulations! Well done: Intelligent Questions & Intelligent Dialogue!
Great question!
How we do the fixing it?
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