"Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention. It is a socially constructed myth--a convenient belief among politicians taken advantage of by those who have a vested interest in shrinking the role of the state, in privatizing social welfare systems for personal gain. It does great harm--punishing the most vulnerable, rather than those who caused this recession."
--David Stuckler (Senior Research Leader, Oxford University) & Sanjay Basu (Epidemiologist, Stanford University), in The Body Economic: Why Austerity Kills. New York: Basic Books, 2013.
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