Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...
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Austerity, Then and Now

Habitat

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Nine

This is the ninth episode of Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. The future of New York has been thrown into question by COVID-19, as the pandemic has taken a massive physical and economic toll on ...
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How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

An interview with Kim Lane Scheppele and Daniel Hegedűs

The Hungarian regime has a wide range of tools to repress its people and it deploys them cleverly to avoid drawing too much criticism at home and abroad. The Green European Journal spoke with Professor Kim Lane Scheppele of Princeton University and political scientist Daniel Hegedűs about Hungary’s autocratic turn ...
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How Orbán Manipulates Markets to Suppress Hungary’s Opposition

An Excerpt from Fear City

New York’s Fiscal Crisis And The Rise Of Austerity Politics

Kim Phillips-Fein’s gripping narrative history, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis And The Rise Of Austerity Politics, has received high praise from a wide ensemble of interested and prominent voices. For instance, James K. Galbraith says: “This revealing narrative of New York’s transformation from working-class social democracy to the glittering home ...
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An Excerpt from Fear City

The Greek Referendum: A New Battle of Marathon

The historical resonance, significance and challenges of ‘no’ on July 5th

Some commentators have compared the victory of the "Oxi" at the Greek referendum of July 5th to a Pyrrhic victory, implying that while the anti-austerity camp won this battle, it is doomed to lose the war, strangled by the insurmountable economic difficulties caused by the lack of liquidity. Others have ...

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The Plight of Greek Higher Education

Greek higher education has been, for the past four years, under a double attack, both by crippling austerity-induced budget cuts and by an attempt to accelerate the imposition of aggressively neoliberal reforms towards an entrepreneurial model of higher education.

To understand the importance of these processes, we ...

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The Plight of Greek Higher Education

The Politics of the Sharing Economy

“As best we can tell, the politics of the venture capital elite boils down to fending off higher taxes, keeping labor costs low and reducing the 'burden' of government regulation. … Silicon Valley could start by putting a stop to pretending that the sharing economy is about anything other than ...

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The Politics of the Sharing Economy

Austerity and Higher Education

The case of the United Kingdom

University reform in the UK can be understood in light of the following dilemma: the system must expand if it is to meet the demand for skill in the labour market, but the more it expands the less it fulfills its other major function of reproducing social division.

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In Support of PODEMOS

One of the most appalling and discouraging outcomes of the recent European elections has been the rise and affirmation of a number of far-right, xenophobic, and populist electoral parties in East and Northern Europe and in France. This has been largely the outcome of years of austerity policies and crisis, ...

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In Support of PODEMOS