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Blyth, Mark. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xiii + 304 pages. Paperback, $19.95.
January 2015 may well go down in the history books as the month that the tide turned against austerity. On the twenty-sixth of that month, the Greek Syriza party swept to victory on an explicitly anti-austerity manifesto. Soon after, Ireland's left-wing parties, particularly Sinn Fein, called for an end to austerity in the Emerald Isle. Only days later, American President Barack Obama firmly rejected austerity in his 2016 fiscal year budget. Such moves no doubt thrilled political economist Mark Blyth, whose book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea argues that "austerity is a dangerous idea for three reasons: it doesn't work in practice, it relies on the poor paying for the mistakes of the rich, and it rests upon the absence of a rather large fallacy of composition that is all too present in the modern world" (p. 10). He makes his case by evaluating both the theory and history of austerity economics.
In Part One, Blyth assesses the justifications usually provided for austerity,...