Join journalist Daniel Denvir, host of The Dig podcast, for a discussion with political economist Mark Blyth.  Political economist Mark Blyth wasn’t surprised by Trump’s win or Brexit’s passage, or what happened to Greece, or Renzi’s failure. In fact, he predicted them all. Just as the post war growth regime based around full employment ran aground in the 1970s and 1980s, so the order that succeeded it, the neoliberal world which was based around eliminating inflation, has come unstuck.  While the first regime blew up because of inflation’s effects on profits, this one is coming undone because of deflations effects on debts. The result is the discrediting of the political parties that built the neoliberal world and the rise of insurgents on the left and the right that in very different ways seek to change neo-liberalism into a form on neo-nationalism.

Blyth, a native of Dundee, Scotland, grew up as he put it, “in relative poverty, in a very real sense [as] a ‘welfare kid.’ Today I’m a professor at an Ivy League university in the USA. Probabilistically speaking, I am as an extreme example of intragenerational social mobility as you can find anywhere.”

He is the Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University and the author of “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea,” and “Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century.”