Suchergebnisse

What are the conditions under which the meaning of the signifier 'austerity' might be reworked for environmental ends? Could the concept of 'austerity' describe a mode of living that is compatible with the challenges of working towards transition and degrowth? This article considers what can be learnt from the UK context, in which social actors in environmental and transition politics have – since the early 2000s – elaborated a concept of 'eco-austerity'. This has been achieved via the mobilization of a particular historical period as symbolic resource: the period 1939-54, an era widely known as 'austerity Britain'. Through an evaluation of this activity, the article identifies the significant challenges presented by a project of recasting the meaning of the signifier 'austerity', as well as the possibilities for alternative future-making that may yet be associated with this concept.

Intro -- Table of Contents -- 1: Introduction -- Introduction -- Overview of the Book -- Note -- 2: Shifting Responses to the Evolution of National Debt and the Economic Role of the State -- Introduction -- Origins of National Debt - and Austerity -- The "Keynesian" Challenge: Austerity in "The Boom, Not the Slump" -- Globalization, Deregulation, and Datasets: Austerity's Evolution During the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-first Centuries -- A Change of Heart at the IMF? -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 3: National Accounting and the Economics of Austerity -- Introduction -- Fiscal Deficits and Public Debt -- Sectoral Financial Balances: Accounting for Public Deficits and Debt -- The Sectoral Financial Balances Model of Aggregate Demand -- Double or Quits: The Fiscal Multiplier -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 4: Selling Austerity: Economics, Politics, and Society -- Introduction -- Does the Public Debt-to-GDP Ratio Tell You When It's Time for Austerity? -- The Debate over Austerity -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 5: Austerity and Welfare: An Unstable Mixture. Britain, Germany, and America between the Wars -- Introduction -- Austerity in Interwar Britain: The "Treasury View" -- Austerity in Weimar Germany -- The American "New Deal" - and "Roosevelt Recession" -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 6: Austerity (and Stimulus) in Postwar Chile, America, Ireland, and Japan -- Introduction -- Austerity in Pinochet's Chile -- Ronald Reagan's "Selective Austerity" -- Ireland and "Expansionary Austerity" -- Japan: Does a Public Debt-to-GDP Ratio of 90 Percent Really Mark a "Stagnation Threshold"? -- Conclusions -- Notes -- 7: Some Have Austerity Thrust Upon Them, Others Embrace It: Ireland, Greece, and Britain after the 2008 Crisis -- Introduction -- Managing a Crisis: Austerity and Recovery in Ireland -- Austerity in Greece: Made in Germany.

Abstract
We study the optimal debt and investment decisions of a sovereign with private information. The separating equilibrium is characterised by a cap on the current account. A sovereign repays debt amount due that exceeds default costs in order to signal creditworthiness and smooth consumption. Accepting funding conditional on investment/reforms relaxes borrowing constraints, even when investment does not create collateral, but it depresses current consumption. The model contains the signalling elements emphasised by creditors in the Greek austerity programmes and is consistent with the reduction in the loans issued by Greece and their interest rate following the 2015 election.

We present data on eighteen demonstrations against austerity politics. A distinction is made between demonstrations against the austerity measures governments are taking (11) and demonstrations against the governments that are taking these measures (7). In total, 3434 demonstrators completed a survey questionnaire inquiring about demographic characteristics, social and political embeddedness, mobilization channels, satisfaction with the way democracy works in their country, identification and motivation. We propose a theoretical framework for the comparison of participants in the two types of demonstrations. Employing anovas, manovas, and logistic regression analyses hypotheses derived from the theoretical framework are tested. With a proportion of correct classifications of 75.6% our model was able to satisfactorily account for the differences between the two types of demonstrations.

More disheartening than the economic catastrophe in the United States and Europe is that government response is making the crisis worse. The response is austerity, which Mark Blyth, in Austerity, defines as "the policy of cutting the state's budget to promote growth" and which Robert Kuttner, in Debtors' Prison, labels "Agony Economics." Both books—informed, passionate, at times angry—document the failure of austerity, detail the resulting human suffering and untangle the historical and ideological origins of austerity.

This essay presents "fattening austerity" as a new conceptual framework that will enable a collective resistance to austerity politics and fat oppression. Austerity and fatphobia have not, to our knowledge, been analyzed in tandem. But the discourses that uphold both punitive austerity measures and the pathologization of fat people's bodies are deeply imbricated. Austerity and anti-fat stigma each invoke a language of crisis to authorize social practices that inflict hunger and bodily injury upon people who are fat and/or poor. In addition, anti-'obesity' rhetoric and pro-austerity arguments each utilize the neoliberal values of "personal responsibility" and corporeal "choice" to further marginalize people who are poor, fat, or both. We argue that it is incumbent upon the political Left—which thus far has been remiss in challenging the anti-fat prejudice that often animates its own movements—to make fat justice a central part of its critique of austerity.

Polly Toynbee has made a career out of shouting that we must be more like Sweden.UK public spending grew from 38pc of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2019 to almost 50pc at the height of the 2020 pandemic after Rishi Sunak as chancellor announced huge taxpayer subsidies to pay people's wages during lockdown.Spending has since come down to 44pc of GDP but remains far higher than its pre-pandemic level.And:Sweden has one of the largest public sectors among OECD countries. Government spending was 49.2% of GDP in 2019, the fifth highest in the OECD We have, in these recent years, become very much more like Sweden. It doesn't seem to have made us - or anyone actually - any happier. So, having tried the experiment we find that it doesn't work. At which point that science thing comes into play. Theories are all very well but they must withstand experimental evidence - if they don't then they're failed theories. We have tested this, will being more like Sweden make Britain happier and the answer is no.Ho Hum.It's also possible to wonder about something else. If government spending has risen by 6% of GDP - which is a lot, even a lorra lots - then what is this story about austerity? Seriously, what austerity?

In this article we have tried to analyze "austerity surveillance" (AS), its features, and its functions under the extreme austerity regime in Greece during 2010−2014, before the election of the leftist government. AS is a specific kind of coercive neoliberal surveillance, which in the name of fighting tax evasion and corruption is targeting the middle and lower economic strata and not the rich upper classes. It is based mainly on "coveillance," i.e. citizen-informers' grassing, public naming, and shaming. Functioning as a domination and disciplinary control mechanism of the entire population, it works within a post-democratic setting without accountability or democratic control. We provide empirical evidence of these features and functions, including some indicative personal testimonies of austerity surveillance subjects. After presenting some cases of electronic surveillance as an indispensable supplement to AS, we then briefly underline the negative personal, and socio-political impact of this surveillance. In conclusion, a tentative assessment is made of AS' efficiency in the Greek case, comparing it with other types of past and present authoritarian surveillance in Greece and in other current surveillance societies, considering also the prospects for its abolition or its reproduction by the new leftist government.

"Austerity Baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'. Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history – but one that is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives (and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer, Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the written word."