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One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year.
Since the collapse of September 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. These questions dominated the sound bites of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, the fiscal-cliff debates, and the perverse policies of the European Union.
Robert Kuttner makes the most powerful argument to date that these are the wrong questions and that austerity is the wrong answer. Blending economics with historical contrasts of effective debt relief and punitive debt enforcement, he makes clear that universal belt-tightening, as a prescription for recession, defies economic logic. And while the public debt gets most of the attention, it is private debts that crashed the economy and are sandbagging the recovery—mortgages, student loans, consumer borrowing to make up for lagging wages, speculative shortfalls incurred by banks. As Kuttner observes, corporations get to use bankruptcy to walk away from debts. Homeowners and small nations don’t. Thus, we need more public borrowing and investment to revive a depressed economy, and more forgiveness and reform of the overhang of past debts.
In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.
From the Hardcover edition.
“Robert Kuttner has a gift for clear and forceful explanations of the complex dealings that brought the economy to its knees. Debtors’ Prison takes an innovative approach to economic history, using the lens of credit and debt to explore past boom-and-bust cycles and to illuminate the central issues in current economic debates. Kuttner’s impressive history also catapults the reader into the future, providing critical insight on strengthening the financial system. A must-read for anyone interested our economic future.”
—Senator Elizabeth Warren
“Debtors’ Prison is more than a devastating brief against the trans-Atlantic pursuit of austerity. It is a magisterial retelling of our history through the prism of the struggle over credit and debt. Navigating between countries and eras with the authority of a scholar and the narrative skill of a journalist, Robert Kuttner has written the authoritative guide to economic recovery and financial reform.”
—Jacob S. Hacker, co-Author of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class
“Robert Kuttner nails the missing piece in Barack Obama’s presidency—the reason the American economy is still stalled and sickly. Read this book, then send it to the White House. Kuttner has the plan. The president needs to see it.”
—William Greider, author of Come Home, America
“No topics in modern political life have spawned more confusion, misdirected effort, and overall malarkey than ‘deficits’ and ‘debt.’ Robert Kuttner does us the enormous service of explaining which kinds of debt we should worry more about, and which kinds less—and how to manage public and private debt so as to sustain an age of broadly shared prosperity rather than of austere decline.”
—James Fallows, author of China Airborne
Overview
One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year.
Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive,...