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Author: Theodoros Rakopoulos Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1785338714 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.
Author: Theodoros Rakopoulos Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1785338714 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
Austerity and structural adjustment programs are just the latest forms of neoliberal policy to have a profoundly damaging impact on the targeted populations. Yet, as the contributors to this collection argue, the recent austerity-related European crisis is not a breach of erstwhile development schemes, but a continuation of economic policies. Using historical analysis and ethnographically-grounded research, this volume shows the similarities of the European conundrum with realities outside Europe, seeing austerity in a non-Eurocentric fashion. In doing so, it offers novel insights as to how economic crises are experienced at a global level.
Author: Mark Blyth Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199389446 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 305
Book Description
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 austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.
Author: David Stuckler Publisher: Basic Books ISBN: 0465063977 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
Politicians have talked endlessly about the seismic economic and social impacts of the recent financial crisis, but many continue to ignore its disastrous effects on human health—and have even exacerbated them, by adopting harsh austerity measures and cutting key social programs at a time when constituents need them most. The result, as pioneering public health experts David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu reveal in this provocative book, is that many countries have turned their recessions into veritable epidemics, ruining or extinguishing thousands of lives in a misguided attempt to balance budgets and shore up financial markets. Yet sound alternative policies could instead help improve economies and protect public health at the same time. In The Body Economic, Stuckler and Basu mine data from around the globe and throughout history to show how government policy becomes a matter of life and death during financial crises. In a series of historical case studies stretching from 1930s America, to Russia and Indonesia in the 1990s, to present-day Greece, Britain, Spain, and the U.S., Stuckler and Basu reveal that governmental mismanagement of financial strife has resulted in a grim array of human tragedies, from suicides to HIV infections. Yet people can and do stay healthy, and even get healthier, during downturns. During the Great Depression, U.S. deaths actually plummeted, and today Iceland, Norway, and Japan are happier and healthier than ever, proof that public wellbeing need not be sacrificed for fiscal health. Full of shocking and counterintuitive revelations and bold policy recommendations, The Body Economic offers an alternative to austerity—one that will prevent widespread suffering, both now and in the future.
Author: Robert Kuttner Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307959813 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year. Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts. In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.
Author: Gargi Bhattacharyya Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137411120 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
Will austerity never end? This timely and insightful book argues that austerity seeks to set the terms of political and economic life for the foreseeable future, extending techniques of exclusion to ever-greater sections of the population.
Author: Sarah Marie Hall Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429574797 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and personal change. With attention to the inequalities produced by these processes and the measures used by individuals, families and communities to help them ‘get by’, it also envisages hopeful, affirmative socio-political futures. Arranged around the themes of intergenerational relations and exchanges, ways of coping through crises, and community, civic and state infrastructures, Austerity Across Europe will appeal to social scientists with interests in everyday life, family practices, neoliberal state policy, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.
Author: Vickie Cooper Publisher: ISBN: 9780745337463 Category : Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Austerity, a response to the aftermath of the financial crisis, continues to devastate contemporary Britain.In The Violence of Austerity, Vickie Cooper and David Whyte bring together the voices of campaigners and academics including Danny Dorling, Mary O'Hara and Rizwaan Sabir to show that rather than stimulating economic growth, austerity policies have led to a dismantling of the social systems that operated as a buffer against economic hardship, exposing austerity to be a form of systematic violence.Covering a range of famous cases of institutional violence in Britain, the book argues that police attacks on the homeless, violent evictions in the rented sector, the risks faced by people on workfare schemes, community violence in Northern Ireland and cuts to the regulation of social protection, are all being driven by reductions in public sector funding. The result is a shocking expos� of the myriad ways in which austerity policies harm people in Britain.
Author: Evdoxios Doxiadis Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1785339346 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 374
Book Description
Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity, with no apparent end in sight. This volume explores the effects of policies pursued by the Greek state since then (under the direction of the Troika), and how Greek society has responded. In addition to charting the actual effects of the Greek crisis on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, the book both examines and challenges the “crisis” era as the context for changing attitudes and developments within Greek society.
Author: Laura Bear Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 9780804795531 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Navigating Austerity addresses a key policy question of our era: what happens to society and the environment when austerity dominates political and economic life? To get to the heart of this issue, Laura Bear tells the stories of boatmen, shipyard workers, hydrographers, port bureaucrats and river pilots on the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges that flows into the Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean. Through their accounts, Bear traces the hidden currents of state debt crises and their often devastating effects. Taking the reader on a voyage along the river, Bear reveals how bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and workers navigate austerity policies. Their attempts to reverse the decline of ruined public infrastructures, environments and urban spaces lead Bear to argue for a radical rethinking of economics according to a social calculus. This is a critical measure derived from the ethical concerns of people affected by national policies. It places issues of redistribution and inequality at the fore of public and environmental plans. Concluding with proposals for restoring more just long term social obligations, Bear suggests new practices of state financing and ways to democratize fiscal policy. Her aim is to transform sovereign debt from a financial problem into a widely debated ethical and political issue. Navigating Austerity contributes to policy studies as well as to the understanding of today's global injustices. It also develops new theories about the significance of state debt, speculation and time for contemporary capitalism. Sited on a single body of water flowing with rhythms of circulation, renewal and transformation, this ambitious and accessible book will be of interest to specialists and general readers.
Author: Leigh Phillips Publisher: John Hunt Publishing ISBN: 1782799613 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 267
Book Description
Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic. Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance. In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway. We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.
Author: Theodoros Rakopoulos
Author: Theodoros Rakopoulos
Author: Mark Blyth
Author: David Stuckler
Author: Robert Kuttner
Author: Gargi Bhattacharyya
Author: Sarah Marie Hall
Author: Vickie Cooper
Author: Evdoxios Doxiadis
Author: Laura Bear
Author: Leigh Phillips