Robert Kuttner

Debtors` Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility

Издательство: Vintage, 2015 г.
978-1-101-91052-8
Книгопечатная продукция
Объем: 352 стр.

Since the financial crisis of 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. But what if we`ve been asking the wrong questions all along? In Debtors` Prison, leading economic thinker Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that with austerity as a solution all we`re doing is jailing ourselves.
Just as debtors` prisons once prevented individuals from resuming a productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth. This is the simple truth belied by the sound bites of presidential elections and fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union. Blending current affairs with economics and history, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe`s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt. Lucid, authoritative, provocative - a book that corrects the economic conversation and encourages a search for new solutions.