Re: The Tough Love of ‘Austerity’

[Dave Monroe]

Austerity: The Great Failure
Florian Schui


Austerity is at the center of political debates today. Its defenders
praise it as a panacea that will prepare the ground for future growth
and stability. Critics insist it will precipitate a vicious cycle of
economic decline, possibly leading to political collapse. But the
notion that abstinence from consumption brings benefits to states,
societies, or individuals is hardly new. This book puts the debates of
our own day in perspective by exploring the long history of
austerity—a popular idea that lives on despite a track record of
dismal failure.

Florian Schui shows that arguments in favor of austerity were—and are
today—mainly based on moral and political considerations, rather than
on economic analysis. Unexpectedly, it is the critics of austerity who
have framed their arguments in the language of economics. Schui finds
that austerity has failed intellectually and in economic terms every
timeit has been attempted. He examines thinkers who have influenced
our ideas about abstinence from Aristotle through such modern economic
thinkers as Smith, Marx, Veblen, Weber, Hayek, and Keynes, as well as
the motives behind specific twentieth-century austerity efforts. The
persistence of the concept cannot be explained from an economic
perspective, Schui concludes, but only from the persuasive appeal of
the moral and political ideas linked to it.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300203936

On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 10:46 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=austerity
>
> On Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 10:19 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/magazine/the-tough-love-of-austerity.html
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