Austerity is a recurring policy suite that entrenches wealth and private primacy

Evidence

It is a trope of twentiethand twentyfi rstcentury life that governments faced with fi nancial shortfalls look fi rst to the services they provide their citizens when making cuts. Instances like these are innumerable and span every country in the world. When this happens, they produce highly predictable, uniformly devastating eff ects on societies. Call it the austerity eff ect: the inevitable public suff ering that ensues when nations and states cut public benefi ts in the name of economic solvency and private industry. While austerity policies may not be identifi ed by name, they underscore the most common tropes of contemporary politics: budget cuts (especially in welfare expenditures such as public education, health care, housing, and unemployment benefi ts), regressive taxation, defl ation, privatization, wage repression, and employment deregulation. Taken together, this suite of policies entrenches existing wealth and the primacy of the private sector, both of which tend to be held up as economic keys that will guide nations to better days. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 21

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explicitly names and defines ‘the austerity effect’ as a policy suite with predictable, devastating social consequences.
• XREF: This working definition sets up the causal framing the reader is seeking: austerity’s mechanisms connect directly to the interwar origins to be traced in the rest of the book. — connects to: Austerity self-perpetuates by generating consent for privatizing governments — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 235; Crises are met by primitive accumulation that privatizes public assets — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 106; Shareholder-value austerity harms firms and society while financiers profit from crashes — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 187 (+12 more)
• SEED: The ‘austerity effect’ framing is a usable rubric for a piece on how budget-cut discourse normalizes regressive class outcomes across modern economies.

Broader Connections

• Austerity’s three policy forms work in unison to depress wages and shift wealth upward #expands (0.93) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 45
• Austerity is a counteroffensive that shifts resources from workers to investors. #expands (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1467
• Austerity’s real function is permanent structural extraction from many to few #expands (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 657
• Austerity is state intervention that transfers resources from workers to capital #expands (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 195
• Austerity is state intervention transferring resources from the many to the few #expands (0.88) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 195
• Austerity is voluntary deflation achieved by cutting state budgets to restore competitiveness #contradicts (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 25