The Debt Delusion: Living Within Our Means and Other Fallacies

‘Governments should spend no more than their tax income.’ Most people in Europe and North America accept this statement as simple common sense. It resonates with the deeply engrained economic metaphors that dominate public discourse, from ‘living within your means’ to ‘balancing the budget’ – all necessary, or so conventional wisdom holds, to avoid the dangers of debt, taxation and financial ruin.

This book shows how these homely metaphors constitute the ‘debt delusion’: a set of plausible...