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The winner receives Debtor's Prison.

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.  

Item Special Note

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