9 ms·

Austerity and the rise of the Nazi party [pdf]

87 points by ericdanielski 9y ago

dang 9y ago
All: if you comment in this thread, please avoid ideological tangents and political rhetoric. They are repetitive and lead to flamewar. Interesting discussions are able to stay specific. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Gys 9y ago
> ... it has been speculated that radical austerity measures, including spending cuts and tax rises, contributed to votes for the Nazi party especially among middle- and upper-classes who had more to lose from them. > Our analysis shows that chancellor Brüning’s austerity measures were positively associated with increasing vote shares for the Nazi party.
philippnagel 9y ago
So, what's the solution to prevent such escalations? As per the discussion, there are at least some hints that some countries are heading in that direction again.
- allthenews 9y ago
  Well, I genuinely wonder, are people drawn to nationalism because of austerity, or are there common causes to both austerity and nationalism? Admittedly, I did not read past the abstract, but the paper seems already to fail to differentiate between causation and correlation.
  - thisisit 9y ago
    I just scanned through the paper and here's a quote: With dashed hopes and a loss of faith in the Weimar Republic, fury and despair were channelled into the ranks of populists and demagogues, with the Nazi party campaigning against austerity and offering promises for a new era of prosperity. So, it's not nationalism rather people getting angry against the government which failed them. Any party can then shape the agenda and turn it towards nationalism or a particular community while promising prosperity.
    - Gibbon1 9y ago
      It's not just failure but perceived abandonment. Consider old school New deal socialists or paleoconservatives. If you told those guys that honest married black men were out of work and couldn't support their families, they would be concerned. Seeing it as their duty to do something. Compare that with Ayn Randian Libertarians who generally think that the destitute should just up and die already. And Hayekian neoliberals that think that's simply not their problem. It's the above attitude that leads to fascism and communism. They become dominant when the social leaders abandon any sense of duty. It's very scary because that's the exact situation in the US currently.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    Austerity causes wage repression in the following ways: * Cuts in benefits make people more reliant upon income from their jobs and give them less leverage. * Cuts to the public sector workforce increases the supply of labor. When the supply of available labor goes up, wages come down. * Cuts to public sector wages reduces competition from the public sector, so wages in the private sector come down too. The strongest effect of this can be seen today in Greece where wages fell ~20%. In Weimar, Bruning actually also issued a direct order to suppress wages (which I'm surprised the authors didn't mention). This did not go down well. People who have suffered from wage repression tend to look for somebody to blame. Extreme nationalism provides targets for that blame. And, the Nazis did end austerity and wages went up again, and of course they provided a scapegoat. Weimar also violently crushed the left wing opposition (the KPD), so people were left with "centrists" vs. "the (Nazi) alternative" and of course a lot of the people who wanted "an alternative" supported the alternative that was available to them, just because it was there.
  - netsharc 9y ago
    My theory is, people want to survive, and they are selfish in order to make sure they do. They first would want to make sure their well-being. Next they would care about their family's survival. Next, their tribe's survival. How big is the tribe, is it the same village, or the same nation, or is it the same race/culture background? And "survival" can be an abstract term. Most people in Western Europe have a warm place to sleep and enough to eat to survive. But maybe they worry about rising prices and worry if they'll have enough (if their government will have enough for them) to retire in 20-30 years. They see their neighbor who got laid off and is still looking for a job months later. Their government says they need to cut some social safety nets because of austerity, and then they hear about the government saying refugees are welcome, with money from... where? My belief is, Angela Merkel basically became the leader of Europe and her (and her finance minister's) disastrous austerity policies lead to so much unhappiness all over Europe, even in Germany itself. As for refugees, someone who says they have no right to be in Europe should -- in my opinion -- stop calling him- or herself a human being. Germany isn't an economic hero, it's exploiting the effects of the single currency while other countries around it are suffering economically. And this has also lead to the rise of populism all over Europe.
    - titanix2 9y ago
      > As for refugees, someone who says they have no right to be in Europe should -- in my opinion -- stop calling him- or herself a human being. This kind of moralistic stance is part of what people drives towards populist parties: being denied even the right to hold an opinion makes people angry. We totally have the right to chose who can come in our country and under which conditions. And that applies to refugees as well. This is not a problem of begin "human" or not, it is about making decisions that will have impact for decades on the European societies.
      - mamon 9y ago
        Additionally, they are not refugees at all. By international law's definition they stop being refugees when they reach the first safe country, which for most of them is Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or other Middle East/African country.By the time they decide to go to Europe they are just plain old immigrants, seeking for better life standard, and we should treat them as such. So far the most reasonable approach to the refugee issue was proposed by Hungarian Prime Minister, who wants EU to help them right there, in the Middle East, instead of letting them in.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- superioritycplx 9y ago
  Simple: stop the SJW movement.
- pdkl95 9y ago
  Mark Blyth has been trying to explain this situation ever since his warning about economic policy leading to a rise of populism, "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea"[1]. For a very good overview of the problem - and some suggestions on how to fix it - see this[2] recent talk. Briefly, the political situation can be fixed quickly if-and-only-if the actual needs of the working classes are actually addressed. That means e.g. some type of single payer healthcare and paying off the student loan burden. [1] http://markblyth.com/books/austerity-the-history-of-a-dangerous-idea/ http://markblyth.com/books/austerity-the-history-of-a-danger... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqGITb0W4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqGITb0W4A
  - tptacek 9y ago
    The rise of populism is tied to student debt, a phenomenon that overwhelmingly impacts the upper middle class?
    - pdkl95 9y ago
      It's limiting who can even enter college. Blyth specifically recommends "Free College Tuition". I (perhaps unwisely) mentioned the milder goal only addressing current student debt with the goal of avoiding being dismissed as "marxism". I strongly recommend listening to Blyth's actual explanation (in this or his other talks & publications), not my poor-quality summary.
      - maxerickson 9y ago
        It would cost a lot less to just have companies take a little more risk when hiring. (There's nothing wrong with making higher education cost less for people that want to do it, but plenty of people are just seeking a credential they see as necessary for access to certain jobs, jobs which often don't need much of the higher education they purport to require)
      - tptacek 9y ago
        The idea that the solution to the core problem of toxic populism just happens to be the policy prescriptions of the Bernie Sanders campaign (I say this as a Democrat!) seems like a bit of a just-so story.
- jernfrost 9y ago
  I think you simply have to borrow money, or pay of debts with inflation. From what I've read the much maligned inflation policy of the weimar republic was actually fairly successful, despite the imagery of people buying bread with buckets of money. Greece could not do this because they were in the Euro area, and had not control over their own money. It seems Iceland which controlled their own currency handled the economic problems much better. Although it is hard to compare as Iceland is a pretty well run country, while Greece struggles with basic stuff like simply collecting taxes. The best is of course to have the discipline to save a lot of money in good years to spend in bad years. For my native Norway this was the situation which is why we basically didn't feel the 2008 downturn at all. We had save a lot of oil money over many years and just spent more of it. The US too weathered the storm not too badly through the expansionary policies of Obama. While the austerity measures in Europe totally screwed up several economies.
allthenews 9y ago
> please avoid ideological tangents and political rhetoric. I worry you may be asking for a bit much in a thread discussing austerity and the rise of Nazism.
- dang 9y ago
  Perhaps, but it's a high-quality submission, and worth seeing whether we can stick to the site guidelines in discussing it.
  - jnordwick 9y ago
    You should just start an econ and politics aggregator. This is about the most blatant of "naked politics" as you can get. It is high quality... For another site. From the guidelines of what off topic: "Most stories about politics". If this is allowed, the guidelines don't mean much.
    - reitanqild 9y ago
      "Most stories about politics" Emphasis mine.
      - jnordwick 9y ago
        Where most seems to mean all stories are allowed. This isn't a new or novel idea. The paper is even six months old. Like i said, if this fits under that restriction then almost anything fits. You might just as well remove that line and start allowing all politics since that what it is in practice.
        megaman22 9y ago
        Any claim to be being a primarily technology-focused site is pretty much kaputt these days. Most stuff is intetesting, but it's reddit for the ycombinator set.
        deleted 9y ago
TangoTrotFox 9y ago
I'm surprised this paper omits any mention of the Bavarian Soviet Republic [1]. In a paper discussing precisely what would have given the Nazi's more support, I don't understand how they managed to omit this. Like the paper discusses there was an increasingly radicalized conflict between far left and far right groups. This first came to organized violence when a group of communists and anarchists overthrew the government of Bavaria, a German state, and declared it the Bavarian Soviet Republic. It was a brutal country for all month long that it existed. Guns were seized along with money, food, and most other necessities of the times. People's houses were stolen and given to vagrants. Factories, farms, and other production facilities were stolen from their owners and given to the workers. And the country rapidly began to face food and supply shortages, similar to what would happen to China during its "great leap forward." And these shortages were met with comments from the government such as, "What does it matter [if we do not have milk]? ... Most of it goes to the children of the bourgeoisie anyway. We are not interested in keeping them alive. No harm if they die – they’d only grow into enemies of the proletariat." And on top of all of this, two of three of the leaders of the groups that overthrew the government were Jewish, at a time when many were already blaming Jews for Germany's defeat in WW1. I'm certain there are many causes for the rise of the Nazis, but not even giving this event mention seems unreasonable. This is certainly one of the most important events in setting the stage for the political changes of the times. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic
- matt4077 9y ago
  I have no idea why this decidedly minor failed movement should figure prominently in any telling of the rise of fascism in Germany. As you state yourself, it lasted for less than a month. I will add that this month in semi-power occurred before Hitler had even joined the Nazi party.
  - TangoTrotFox 9y ago
    Imagine for a minute that in some moderate sized state in the US, radical left or radical right individuals organized and violently overthrew the government by force with tens of thousands of 'soldiers.' And then they started living up to every imagined stereotype of their ideology. Can you imagine how that would change this country? How would you respond? I expect we would almost certainly end up going hard in the opposite ideological direction of whomever did it. This a crucial point in understanding how and why it was so [relatively] 'easy' for quite absurd views to start to take hold.
lifeisstillgood 9y ago
What I take from this is not "austerity allows extremists to take over" but you need the middle and upper classes support to take over a country. The austerity part was just the bit that persuaded the middle classes to put up with all the rest of Hitlers rhetoric. The spending cut was dramatic in the paper - 25% drop in government spending. In the UK our austerity program at the height of 2010-15 was a reduction in the growth of spending (not a nominal cut). AFAIK only greece has seen such a dramatic reduction in GDP (and I am not sure the government spending cuts have been so deep). Additionally it's worth noting David Runciman's comments on Greece and Nazi party (#) here - he posits the major difference is one of age - Germany and Europe were young (25 years on average) then but now greece is a muchnolder population- old guys riot less it seems. This looks like a decent paper on an area of interest but Runcimans presentation above reflects my thoughts - if we do screw up the world again, the threat this time will look different, come from a different angle. We should not just avoid the mistakes of history - we are really good at coming up with whole new mistakes as well. (#) Talking politics podcast cannot find the right episode.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >In the UK our austerity program at the height of 2010-15 was a reduction in the growth of spending (not a nominal cut). In the UK the cuts were directed - largely at public sector jobs and wages and benefits, foodbanks, etc. You can take £1,000 of money spent on foodbanks or soldier wages and just give it to a military contractor or Carillion and technically public sector spending hasn't been cut by £1000, but the effect is as if it had. Nonetheless, the effect of austerity in the UK was a lot milder than it was in Greece and, as a consequence, we don't have people waving swastika flags around like they do.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > We don't have people waving swastika flags around like they do. .. yet. We did have an MP shot by a member of a far-right organisation, and we do have an ongoing problem with fascist newspapers. "Crush the saboteurs" and all that. It has now become alarmingly routine to refer to the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition as a traitor.
trappist 9y ago
> ... austerity measures, measured as the combination of tax increases and spending cuts... Wikipedia defines the term as either or both of these things. Investopedia defines it as only the latter, and modern political discourse seems to do the same. At any rate the definition seems contentious, and the headline potentially misleading (increase spending to avoid the rise of a catastrophically evil regime).
nimbius 9y ago
Reading the article I can draw some distinct comparisons to the United States colonies in the sixteen hundreds at the helm of people like Cotton Mather. He may have been a decent local leader if England hadnt insisted on bleeding the US dry to pay for war. Instead he rose quickly to power and not only doubled down on his west african savage rhetoric in order to preserve what would now be considered libertarian ethos, but helped to cement a 200 year old legacy of racist and prejudice thinking in the united states. Much of the reason interracial marriage was shunned throughout american history is due to prejudice he introduced intentionally to avoid marriage conditions rendering slaves automatically freed. Mather worked directly to oppose englands emancipation laws from being extended into the colonies, as it would have restricted the ability to trade on the open market (specifically cotton) and continued US dependence upon the crown.
matt4077 9y ago
Resist the temptation of applying this to other situations. Some caveats: - The US didn't actually embark on anything resembling austerity in 2008-2016. - The narrative that the current US Oresident was swept into office by economic complaints has not held up well. Among other things, it's become quite clear that Trump voters were not primarily those under economic threat. Race, education, and gender were far more meaningful predictors of voting (R)[0]. - Any such causality also fails if you compare economic conditions in 2016 to, for example 2012. Or, if you want to focus on economic anxiety and not headline numbers such as unemployment, 2008. - Economic factors also fail to explain the decidedly different situations with similar outcomes we've seen in Britain, or Austria. - Even the poster child for austerity in modern politics, Greece, has somehow managed to keep it together, somehow. [0]: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre...
- tlogan 9y ago
  I agree - it is very hard to find the cause. I'm thinking the raise of extreme nationalism and populism (i.e., nazis) seems to caused more by pace of changes (rate of it) in the society and economy than by economical problems or even immigration. It seems like that Nazis are more a reaction on the pace of the changes. For example, science was rapidly changing (weird quantum mechanic and even weirder general relativity are both from Germany), society was becoming very liberal (religious tolerance, etc.), economy (fiat currencies, etc.) and so on. In short, "change" anxiety causes this.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    I wonder if it’s just cyclical. Nazism and similar ideologies are clearly attractive. They hook into some fundamental part of the human psyche. They are also repellant. Their success depends on which of these factors is stronger. A big part of what makes them repellant is seeing what the real world consequences are. It’s hard to find Nazism attractive when you’ve seen it produce genocide and the near total destruction of its country in war. But that was a long time ago. There aren’t many people left alive who remember that time. The horrors are going from concrete to abstract. I hope it’s not true, but maybe we can’t shift away from it until we have another example of how bad it is.
BenoitEssiambre 9y ago
I'm not sure why, but a lot of these articles fail to properly distinguish between government fiscal austerity (government reducing deficit or debt) and monetary austerity (central banks reducing the growth of the money supply). There are reasons to perform austerity but it's rarely a good idea to do it on both of these sides at the same time. When governments are trying to get out of a debt hole, monetary policy should be expansionary enough to allow for the private sector to grow and replace the economic activity that the government is halting. The alternative double austerity leads to, on an economy wide scale, investors' attempts at building wealth, being transformed into hoarding of intrinsically valueless pieces of paper or electrons instead of being tied to something real, instead of being tied to factories, businesses projects and tools that allow people to work. It leads to people not working and not being able to subsist because the investment market is put into a gridlock. The detrimental effects are not evenly distributed. It disproportionately and very nonlinearly affects groups that are economically vulnerable, the less educated, people working in commoditized industries where margins are thin, the inexperienced. The potential for livelihood for these people simply disappears when hoarding paper becomes more alluring than investing in these types of job creating projects. The resulting desperation pushes people to extremes. The ECB has been doing a mild version of this for the past decade, putting western civilization at risk. The US central bank is finally doing a better job but only after reasonable leaders were pushed aside and fanatics gained power. There is now a risk that the fanatics will get the credit for the better economy which might help them maintain power.
- qubex 9y ago
  I’m Italian and I’ve witnessed this over the course of the past five to ten years. The whole county, fragile enough to begin with, has been subjected to an utter death-march of diminishing returns as margins decrease, no longer cover fixed costs, and cause businesses to fail while dropping prices all the way until whole swathes of the economy simply shrivel up and die. I was struck by the parallels between what is described in this paper and the very recent (week old) national elections, the first to be held in five years. There was an overwhelming swing towards extremist parties (one in two voted either for the xenophobic nationalistic formerly openly racist Northern League or the wildly populist Five Star Movement). The disposition along the north/south axis correlates sharply with unemployment and other forms of economic/social duress and I cannot help fearing that this is the fate that will befall us.
purplezooey 9y ago
"...combination of tax increases and spending cuts..." As of the moment we only have the political appetite for the spending cuts and tax cuts. The tax raises will come later when we realize how far we've bankrupted the social safety net programs, perhaps 10, 20 years from now.
- trhway 9y ago
  >As of the moment we only have the political appetite for the spending cuts and tax cuts. if you're about US then it is spending increase and tax cuts. "Spending cuts" in US is just a rhetoric in order to redirect money from some political opponents' programs into political allies' program while overall increasing the spending.
UncleEntity 9y ago
So...having failed to convince everyone that austerity would lead to the fall of Western Civilization now the Keynesians are saying that austerity is the cause of Neo-Nazism? Not that I'm surprised, very little of their pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo (complete with equations) surprises me anymore. What I don't understand is they claim austerity is the cause of Trump's rise to power when Clinton was pretty much the poster-child of the anti-austerity movement, I don't think anyone seriously considered she wouldn't continue following Obama's economic roadmap as opposed to Trump's claims of reigning in government deficit spending and waste.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > Trump's claims of reigning in government deficit spending and waste Trump also promised a huge infrastructure spending plan and a border wall. I wouldn't say Clinton was especially anti-austerity either, that was Sanders' thing.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  To reply to myself... Having gone down the rabbit hole I came up with an article about the Occupation of the Ruhr[0] (with no mention in tfa) after Germany defaulted on their reparation payments which claims: > In German politics, the French occupation of the Rhineland accelerated the formation of right-wing parties. If I were to look for the causes of the rise of the Nazis that would be pretty high on my list. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr
jernfrost 9y ago
Not completely surprising, given that we saw similar effects in Greece, during the austerity measures there.
verylittlemeat 9y ago
RE: Austerity and economic analysis in general >How Seriously Should We Take Economics? >Economics is a science—it proceeds via hypothesis and empirical testing—but it’s a soft and squishy one, and any argument to the contrary should be treated with great suspicion. Especially in macroeconomics, hard-and-fast laws are hard to find. So are stable parameters and reliable empirical studies. Often, about the best we can do is isolate general tendencies, and then look carefully to see whether they apply in the case under consideration.[0] [0]https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and-rogoff-controversy-a-summing-up https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and... I encourage anyone interested in austerity to read this article. It's relatively short and insightful.
stuaxo 9y ago
I thought this was common knowledge, but it wasn't mentioned at all when it was pushed as a policy after 2008

87 points by ericdanielski 9y ago

dang 9y ago

All: if you comment in this thread, please avoid ideological tangents and political rhetoric. They are repetitive and lead to flamewar. Interesting discussions are able to stay specific. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Gys 9y ago

> ... it has been speculated that radical austerity measures, including spending cuts and tax rises, contributed to votes for the Nazi party especially among middle- and upper-classes who had more to lose from them. > Our analysis shows that chancellor Brüning’s austerity measures were positively associated with increasing vote shares for the Nazi party.

philippnagel 9y ago

So, what's the solution to prevent such escalations? As per the discussion, there are at least some hints that some countries are heading in that direction again.

allthenews 9y ago
Well, I genuinely wonder, are people drawn to nationalism because of austerity, or are there common causes to both austerity and nationalism? Admittedly, I did not read past the abstract, but the paper seems already to fail to differentiate between causation and correlation.
- thisisit 9y ago
  I just scanned through the paper and here's a quote: With dashed hopes and a loss of faith in the Weimar Republic, fury and despair were channelled into the ranks of populists and demagogues, with the Nazi party campaigning against austerity and offering promises for a new era of prosperity. So, it's not nationalism rather people getting angry against the government which failed them. Any party can then shape the agenda and turn it towards nationalism or a particular community while promising prosperity.
  - Gibbon1 9y ago
    It's not just failure but perceived abandonment. Consider old school New deal socialists or paleoconservatives. If you told those guys that honest married black men were out of work and couldn't support their families, they would be concerned. Seeing it as their duty to do something. Compare that with Ayn Randian Libertarians who generally think that the destitute should just up and die already. And Hayekian neoliberals that think that's simply not their problem. It's the above attitude that leads to fascism and communism. They become dominant when the social leaders abandon any sense of duty. It's very scary because that's the exact situation in the US currently.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  Austerity causes wage repression in the following ways: * Cuts in benefits make people more reliant upon income from their jobs and give them less leverage. * Cuts to the public sector workforce increases the supply of labor. When the supply of available labor goes up, wages come down. * Cuts to public sector wages reduces competition from the public sector, so wages in the private sector come down too. The strongest effect of this can be seen today in Greece where wages fell ~20%. In Weimar, Bruning actually also issued a direct order to suppress wages (which I'm surprised the authors didn't mention). This did not go down well. People who have suffered from wage repression tend to look for somebody to blame. Extreme nationalism provides targets for that blame. And, the Nazis did end austerity and wages went up again, and of course they provided a scapegoat. Weimar also violently crushed the left wing opposition (the KPD), so people were left with "centrists" vs. "the (Nazi) alternative" and of course a lot of the people who wanted "an alternative" supported the alternative that was available to them, just because it was there.
- netsharc 9y ago
  My theory is, people want to survive, and they are selfish in order to make sure they do. They first would want to make sure their well-being. Next they would care about their family's survival. Next, their tribe's survival. How big is the tribe, is it the same village, or the same nation, or is it the same race/culture background? And "survival" can be an abstract term. Most people in Western Europe have a warm place to sleep and enough to eat to survive. But maybe they worry about rising prices and worry if they'll have enough (if their government will have enough for them) to retire in 20-30 years. They see their neighbor who got laid off and is still looking for a job months later. Their government says they need to cut some social safety nets because of austerity, and then they hear about the government saying refugees are welcome, with money from... where? My belief is, Angela Merkel basically became the leader of Europe and her (and her finance minister's) disastrous austerity policies lead to so much unhappiness all over Europe, even in Germany itself. As for refugees, someone who says they have no right to be in Europe should -- in my opinion -- stop calling him- or herself a human being. Germany isn't an economic hero, it's exploiting the effects of the single currency while other countries around it are suffering economically. And this has also lead to the rise of populism all over Europe.
  - titanix2 9y ago
    > As for refugees, someone who says they have no right to be in Europe should -- in my opinion -- stop calling him- or herself a human being. This kind of moralistic stance is part of what people drives towards populist parties: being denied even the right to hold an opinion makes people angry. We totally have the right to chose who can come in our country and under which conditions. And that applies to refugees as well. This is not a problem of begin "human" or not, it is about making decisions that will have impact for decades on the European societies.
    - mamon 9y ago
      Additionally, they are not refugees at all. By international law's definition they stop being refugees when they reach the first safe country, which for most of them is Turkey, or Saudi Arabia, or other Middle East/African country.By the time they decide to go to Europe they are just plain old immigrants, seeking for better life standard, and we should treat them as such. So far the most reasonable approach to the refugee issue was proposed by Hungarian Prime Minister, who wants EU to help them right there, in the Middle East, instead of letting them in.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
superioritycplx 9y ago
Simple: stop the SJW movement.
pdkl95 9y ago
Mark Blyth has been trying to explain this situation ever since his warning about economic policy leading to a rise of populism, "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea"[1]. For a very good overview of the problem - and some suggestions on how to fix it - see this[2] recent talk. Briefly, the political situation can be fixed quickly if-and-only-if the actual needs of the working classes are actually addressed. That means e.g. some type of single payer healthcare and paying off the student loan burden. [1] http://markblyth.com/books/austerity-the-history-of-a-dangerous-idea/ http://markblyth.com/books/austerity-the-history-of-a-danger... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqGITb0W4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsqGITb0W4A
- tptacek 9y ago
  The rise of populism is tied to student debt, a phenomenon that overwhelmingly impacts the upper middle class?
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    It's limiting who can even enter college. Blyth specifically recommends "Free College Tuition". I (perhaps unwisely) mentioned the milder goal only addressing current student debt with the goal of avoiding being dismissed as "marxism". I strongly recommend listening to Blyth's actual explanation (in this or his other talks & publications), not my poor-quality summary.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      It would cost a lot less to just have companies take a little more risk when hiring. (There's nothing wrong with making higher education cost less for people that want to do it, but plenty of people are just seeking a credential they see as necessary for access to certain jobs, jobs which often don't need much of the higher education they purport to require)
    - tptacek 9y ago
      The idea that the solution to the core problem of toxic populism just happens to be the policy prescriptions of the Bernie Sanders campaign (I say this as a Democrat!) seems like a bit of a just-so story.
jernfrost 9y ago
I think you simply have to borrow money, or pay of debts with inflation. From what I've read the much maligned inflation policy of the weimar republic was actually fairly successful, despite the imagery of people buying bread with buckets of money. Greece could not do this because they were in the Euro area, and had not control over their own money. It seems Iceland which controlled their own currency handled the economic problems much better. Although it is hard to compare as Iceland is a pretty well run country, while Greece struggles with basic stuff like simply collecting taxes. The best is of course to have the discipline to save a lot of money in good years to spend in bad years. For my native Norway this was the situation which is why we basically didn't feel the 2008 downturn at all. We had save a lot of oil money over many years and just spent more of it. The US too weathered the storm not too badly through the expansionary policies of Obama. While the austerity measures in Europe totally screwed up several economies.

allthenews 9y ago

> please avoid ideological tangents and political rhetoric. I worry you may be asking for a bit much in a thread discussing austerity and the rise of Nazism.

dang 9y ago
Perhaps, but it's a high-quality submission, and worth seeing whether we can stick to the site guidelines in discussing it.
- jnordwick 9y ago
  You should just start an econ and politics aggregator. This is about the most blatant of "naked politics" as you can get. It is high quality... For another site. From the guidelines of what off topic: "Most stories about politics". If this is allowed, the guidelines don't mean much.
  - reitanqild 9y ago
    "Most stories about politics" Emphasis mine.
    - jnordwick 9y ago
      Where most seems to mean all stories are allowed. This isn't a new or novel idea. The paper is even six months old. Like i said, if this fits under that restriction then almost anything fits. You might just as well remove that line and start allowing all politics since that what it is in practice.
      - megaman22 9y ago
        Any claim to be being a primarily technology-focused site is pretty much kaputt these days. Most stuff is intetesting, but it's reddit for the ycombinator set.
        deleted 9y ago

TangoTrotFox 9y ago

I'm surprised this paper omits any mention of the Bavarian Soviet Republic [1]. In a paper discussing precisely what would have given the Nazi's more support, I don't understand how they managed to omit this. Like the paper discusses there was an increasingly radicalized conflict between far left and far right groups. This first came to organized violence when a group of communists and anarchists overthrew the government of Bavaria, a German state, and declared it the Bavarian Soviet Republic. It was a brutal country for all month long that it existed. Guns were seized along with money, food, and most other necessities of the times. People's houses were stolen and given to vagrants. Factories, farms, and other production facilities were stolen from their owners and given to the workers. And the country rapidly began to face food and supply shortages, similar to what would happen to China during its "great leap forward." And these shortages were met with comments from the government such as, "What does it matter [if we do not have milk]? ... Most of it goes to the children of the bourgeoisie anyway. We are not interested in keeping them alive. No harm if they die – they’d only grow into enemies of the proletariat." And on top of all of this, two of three of the leaders of the groups that overthrew the government were Jewish, at a time when many were already blaming Jews for Germany's defeat in WW1. I'm certain there are many causes for the rise of the Nazis, but not even giving this event mention seems unreasonable. This is certainly one of the most important events in setting the stage for the political changes of the times. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Soviet_Republic

matt4077 9y ago
I have no idea why this decidedly minor failed movement should figure prominently in any telling of the rise of fascism in Germany. As you state yourself, it lasted for less than a month. I will add that this month in semi-power occurred before Hitler had even joined the Nazi party.
- TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  Imagine for a minute that in some moderate sized state in the US, radical left or radical right individuals organized and violently overthrew the government by force with tens of thousands of 'soldiers.' And then they started living up to every imagined stereotype of their ideology. Can you imagine how that would change this country? How would you respond? I expect we would almost certainly end up going hard in the opposite ideological direction of whomever did it. This a crucial point in understanding how and why it was so [relatively] 'easy' for quite absurd views to start to take hold.

lifeisstillgood 9y ago

What I take from this is not "austerity allows extremists to take over" but you need the middle and upper classes support to take over a country. The austerity part was just the bit that persuaded the middle classes to put up with all the rest of Hitlers rhetoric. The spending cut was dramatic in the paper - 25% drop in government spending. In the UK our austerity program at the height of 2010-15 was a reduction in the growth of spending (not a nominal cut). AFAIK only greece has seen such a dramatic reduction in GDP (and I am not sure the government spending cuts have been so deep). Additionally it's worth noting David Runciman's comments on Greece and Nazi party (#) here - he posits the major difference is one of age - Germany and Europe were young (25 years on average) then but now greece is a muchnolder population- old guys riot less it seems. This looks like a decent paper on an area of interest but Runcimans presentation above reflects my thoughts - if we do screw up the world again, the threat this time will look different, come from a different angle. We should not just avoid the mistakes of history - we are really good at coming up with whole new mistakes as well. (#) Talking politics podcast cannot find the right episode.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>In the UK our austerity program at the height of 2010-15 was a reduction in the growth of spending (not a nominal cut). In the UK the cuts were directed - largely at public sector jobs and wages and benefits, foodbanks, etc. You can take £1,000 of money spent on foodbanks or soldier wages and just give it to a military contractor or Carillion and technically public sector spending hasn't been cut by £1000, but the effect is as if it had. Nonetheless, the effect of austerity in the UK was a lot milder than it was in Greece and, as a consequence, we don't have people waving swastika flags around like they do.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > We don't have people waving swastika flags around like they do. .. yet. We did have an MP shot by a member of a far-right organisation, and we do have an ongoing problem with fascist newspapers. "Crush the saboteurs" and all that. It has now become alarmingly routine to refer to the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition as a traitor.

trappist 9y ago

> ... austerity measures, measured as the combination of tax increases and spending cuts... Wikipedia defines the term as either or both of these things. Investopedia defines it as only the latter, and modern political discourse seems to do the same. At any rate the definition seems contentious, and the headline potentially misleading (increase spending to avoid the rise of a catastrophically evil regime).

nimbius 9y ago

Reading the article I can draw some distinct comparisons to the United States colonies in the sixteen hundreds at the helm of people like Cotton Mather. He may have been a decent local leader if England hadnt insisted on bleeding the US dry to pay for war. Instead he rose quickly to power and not only doubled down on his west african savage rhetoric in order to preserve what would now be considered libertarian ethos, but helped to cement a 200 year old legacy of racist and prejudice thinking in the united states. Much of the reason interracial marriage was shunned throughout american history is due to prejudice he introduced intentionally to avoid marriage conditions rendering slaves automatically freed. Mather worked directly to oppose englands emancipation laws from being extended into the colonies, as it would have restricted the ability to trade on the open market (specifically cotton) and continued US dependence upon the crown.

matt4077 9y ago

Resist the temptation of applying this to other situations. Some caveats: - The US didn't actually embark on anything resembling austerity in 2008-2016. - The narrative that the current US Oresident was swept into office by economic complaints has not held up well. Among other things, it's become quite clear that Trump voters were not primarily those under economic threat. Race, education, and gender were far more meaningful predictors of voting (R)[0]. - Any such causality also fails if you compare economic conditions in 2016 to, for example 2012. Or, if you want to focus on economic anxiety and not headline numbers such as unemployment, 2008. - Economic factors also fail to explain the decidedly different situations with similar outcomes we've seen in Britain, or Austria. - Even the poster child for austerity in modern politics, Greece, has somehow managed to keep it together, somehow. [0]: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who-would-vote-for-trump/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-pre...

tlogan 9y ago
I agree - it is very hard to find the cause. I'm thinking the raise of extreme nationalism and populism (i.e., nazis) seems to caused more by pace of changes (rate of it) in the society and economy than by economical problems or even immigration. It seems like that Nazis are more a reaction on the pace of the changes. For example, science was rapidly changing (weird quantum mechanic and even weirder general relativity are both from Germany), society was becoming very liberal (religious tolerance, etc.), economy (fiat currencies, etc.) and so on. In short, "change" anxiety causes this.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I wonder if it’s just cyclical. Nazism and similar ideologies are clearly attractive. They hook into some fundamental part of the human psyche. They are also repellant. Their success depends on which of these factors is stronger. A big part of what makes them repellant is seeing what the real world consequences are. It’s hard to find Nazism attractive when you’ve seen it produce genocide and the near total destruction of its country in war. But that was a long time ago. There aren’t many people left alive who remember that time. The horrors are going from concrete to abstract. I hope it’s not true, but maybe we can’t shift away from it until we have another example of how bad it is.

BenoitEssiambre 9y ago

I'm not sure why, but a lot of these articles fail to properly distinguish between government fiscal austerity (government reducing deficit or debt) and monetary austerity (central banks reducing the growth of the money supply). There are reasons to perform austerity but it's rarely a good idea to do it on both of these sides at the same time. When governments are trying to get out of a debt hole, monetary policy should be expansionary enough to allow for the private sector to grow and replace the economic activity that the government is halting. The alternative double austerity leads to, on an economy wide scale, investors' attempts at building wealth, being transformed into hoarding of intrinsically valueless pieces of paper or electrons instead of being tied to something real, instead of being tied to factories, businesses projects and tools that allow people to work. It leads to people not working and not being able to subsist because the investment market is put into a gridlock. The detrimental effects are not evenly distributed. It disproportionately and very nonlinearly affects groups that are economically vulnerable, the less educated, people working in commoditized industries where margins are thin, the inexperienced. The potential for livelihood for these people simply disappears when hoarding paper becomes more alluring than investing in these types of job creating projects. The resulting desperation pushes people to extremes. The ECB has been doing a mild version of this for the past decade, putting western civilization at risk. The US central bank is finally doing a better job but only after reasonable leaders were pushed aside and fanatics gained power. There is now a risk that the fanatics will get the credit for the better economy which might help them maintain power.

qubex 9y ago
I’m Italian and I’ve witnessed this over the course of the past five to ten years. The whole county, fragile enough to begin with, has been subjected to an utter death-march of diminishing returns as margins decrease, no longer cover fixed costs, and cause businesses to fail while dropping prices all the way until whole swathes of the economy simply shrivel up and die. I was struck by the parallels between what is described in this paper and the very recent (week old) national elections, the first to be held in five years. There was an overwhelming swing towards extremist parties (one in two voted either for the xenophobic nationalistic formerly openly racist Northern League or the wildly populist Five Star Movement). The disposition along the north/south axis correlates sharply with unemployment and other forms of economic/social duress and I cannot help fearing that this is the fate that will befall us.

purplezooey 9y ago

"...combination of tax increases and spending cuts..." As of the moment we only have the political appetite for the spending cuts and tax cuts. The tax raises will come later when we realize how far we've bankrupted the social safety net programs, perhaps 10, 20 years from now.

trhway 9y ago
>As of the moment we only have the political appetite for the spending cuts and tax cuts. if you're about US then it is spending increase and tax cuts. "Spending cuts" in US is just a rhetoric in order to redirect money from some political opponents' programs into political allies' program while overall increasing the spending.

UncleEntity 9y ago

So...having failed to convince everyone that austerity would lead to the fall of Western Civilization now the Keynesians are saying that austerity is the cause of Neo-Nazism? Not that I'm surprised, very little of their pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo (complete with equations) surprises me anymore. What I don't understand is they claim austerity is the cause of Trump's rise to power when Clinton was pretty much the poster-child of the anti-austerity movement, I don't think anyone seriously considered she wouldn't continue following Obama's economic roadmap as opposed to Trump's claims of reigning in government deficit spending and waste.

pjc50 9y ago
> Trump's claims of reigning in government deficit spending and waste Trump also promised a huge infrastructure spending plan and a border wall. I wouldn't say Clinton was especially anti-austerity either, that was Sanders' thing.
UncleEntity 9y ago
To reply to myself... Having gone down the rabbit hole I came up with an article about the Occupation of the Ruhr[0] (with no mention in tfa) after Germany defaulted on their reparation payments which claims: > In German politics, the French occupation of the Rhineland accelerated the formation of right-wing parties. If I were to look for the causes of the rise of the Nazis that would be pretty high on my list. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Ruhr

jernfrost 9y ago

Not completely surprising, given that we saw similar effects in Greece, during the austerity measures there.

verylittlemeat 9y ago

RE: Austerity and economic analysis in general >How Seriously Should We Take Economics? >Economics is a science—it proceeds via hypothesis and empirical testing—but it’s a soft and squishy one, and any argument to the contrary should be treated with great suspicion. Especially in macroeconomics, hard-and-fast laws are hard to find. So are stable parameters and reliable empirical studies. Often, about the best we can do is isolate general tendencies, and then look carefully to see whether they apply in the case under consideration.[0] [0]https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and-rogoff-controversy-a-summing-up https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/the-reinhart-and... I encourage anyone interested in austerity to read this article. It's relatively short and insightful.

stuaxo 9y ago

I thought this was common knowledge, but it wasn't mentioned at all when it was pushed as a policy after 2008