Mark Blyth on ending the creditor’s paradise

An American economist, Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea, gave a talk to members of the German Social Democratic Party on why so-called austerity is a bad idea.

I write “so-called” because the dictionary meaning of austerity is doing without things you don’t really need.  Food rationing in the UK and USA during World War Two is an example of austerity.  It doesn’t mean prioritizing the requirements of holders of financial assets over the needs of everybody else.

Here’s why Blyth had to say.

Back in the 1970s, a period that now seems quite benign, corporate profits were very low, labor’s share of income was very high, and inflation was rising.  We were told that this was unsustainable, and new institutions and policies were constructed to make sure that this particular mix of outcomes would never happen again.

In this regard we were singularly successful.  Today, corporate profits have never been higher, labor’s share of national income has almost never been lower, and inflation has given way to deflation.  So are we happier for this change?

What we have done over the past thirty years is to build a creditor’s paradise of positive real interest rates, low inflation, open markets, beaten-down unions, and a retreating state — all policed by unelected economic officials in central banks and other unelected institutions that have only one target: to keep such a creditor’s paradise going.

In such a world, why would you, the average worker, ever get a pay rise?

Austerity: the global reach of a bad ideology

The Western world is in the grip of a bad idea that its governments can’t seem to shake off—although its peoples are starting to.

The idea is called “austerity.” It is the belief that public goods must be destroyed in order to increase private wealth.

Banks impose this policy on indebted nations such as Greece.  They say the governments must curtail public services, including schools and public health, while raising taxes and adopting economic policies that will result in higher prices and lower wages.

Supposedly the money saved can be used to pay off the nation’s debts.  The problem is that so-called austerity destroys the nation’s ability to generate new wealth, and so, as long as countries accept the “austerity” meme, they stay in debt indefinitely.

Nations that default on their debts, as American states frequently did in the era before the Civil War, are threatened with loss of credit.  But the fact is that the banking system literally has more money than the bankers know what to do with.  In practice, lending always starts up again after a few years.

Members of the European Union that use the Euro as their currency have a special problem.  Historically the exchange rates of currencies fell when the issuing nation had a balance of payments deficit.  This tended to bring the balance of trade into balance, because their exports became cheaper in relation to foreign currencies and their imports became more expensive.

Under austerity, nations attempt to achieve the same thing by increasing prices, lowering wages and cutting government services.  Unlike with change in the exchange rate, the burden does not fall upon the whole nation equally, but only on the less wealthy and politically powerless.

Austerity involves raising taxes, but never taxes on the wealthy.  That is because the wealthy are considered to be the “job creators” who must be catered to in order to bring about economic recovery.

The “job creator” philosophy is popular here in the USA.  The saying is, “No poor man ever gave me a job.”  The conclusion is that the key to jobs is to have more and richer rich people.

Well, we Americans have made that experiment, repeatedly, and it hasn’t worked.

If we want mass prosperity, we need to invest in the things that create wealth—education, public infrastructure and scientific research—and then see that the benefits of the new wealth are widely spread, so as to create markets for private business.

We Americans once made that experiment, too, and it did work.

The old American myth and the new one

When I was growing up, most Americans believed that one of the things that made our country exceptional was “the American standard of living” — that Americans of all social classes were better off than their counterparts elsewhere, and that is why everyone would want to move to the USA if they could.

Now we’re adopting a new belief — that what makes our country exceptional, at least compared to European nations, is that we Americans are tough and therefore don’t need job security, guaranteed medical care or all the other things that cushion their lives.   However, if the Europeans follow their present austerity course, we may not be exceptional in that respect, either.