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

Clara E. Mattei

gush 2023 · Tantor Media Inc · Treguar nga Susan Ericksen

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For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity-cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits-as a path to solvency. Today, an important question remains: What if solvency was never the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism-in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies. Where these policies "succeeded," relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material, The Capital Order offers a damning account of the rise of austerity-and of modern economics-at the levers of contemporary political power.

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Clara E. Mattei is assistant professor of economics at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Susan Ericksen is a three-time Audie Award-winning narrator who has recorded over 500 books. The winner of multiple awards, including twenty-plus AudioFile Earphones Awards for both fiction and nonfiction, Susan is a classically trained actress who excels at multiple narrative styles and accents.