Book Review: Blyth, Mark (2015) Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.

Abstract

Mark Blyth is a butcher’s son from Dundee raised after the early death of his mother by his paternal grandmother. At the start of his book he acknowledges that without the support of a strong welfare state in childhood, he would have been unlikely to have made the transition from a relatively poor background to his current position of professor of International Political Economy at an Ivy League University in the United States. A central message of this book is how a crisis in the private sector has been erroneously (and purposely) reframed as a public sector problem caused by excessive state spending.