Moral framing of recessions as punishment blocks public acceptance of stimulus

Evidence

The second element is that people see economic issues through moral frames and people think there’s an extent to which recessions are punishment for sins—mainly sins of excess—and you don’t expiate sins by binges. So there’s a kind of moral counterintuitiveness that has made it difficult for the public and for political figures to accept stimulus. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 562

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s other material on moral panics and the moral dimension of social reaction (seen in rejected links), plus the punishment-for-sins framing of austerity discourse generally. — connects to: The 2008 crisis flowed from incentive structures, not individual moral failure — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 73; Treating economic shocks as blameworthy endogenous outcomes justifies removing policy tools from elected officials — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 253; Risk discourse retroactively moralizes outcomes whose causality it denies beforehand — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 342 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Monetary austerity was designed to moralize and discipline economic behavior toward thrift #complicates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 759