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.