This book analyzes and ties together some of the most important economic developments of recent years, with the common theme that they have been widely misunderstood and in some cases almost completely ignored. Regarding the eurozone, for example, the book shows that the European authorities’ political agenda, which included shrinking the welfare state, reducing healthcare, pensions, and other social spending, and reducing the bargaining power of labor, played a very important role—along with failed macroeconomic policy—in prolonging the eurozone’s financial crisis and its lapse into additiona ... More

This book analyzes and ties together some of the most important economic developments of recent years, with the common theme that they have been widely misunderstood and in some cases almost completely ignored. Regarding the eurozone, for example, the book shows that the European authorities’ political agenda, which included shrinking the welfare state, reducing healthcare, pensions, and other social spending, and reducing the bargaining power of labor, played a very important role—along with failed macroeconomic policy—in prolonging the eurozone’s financial crisis and its lapse into additional years of recession and mass unemployment. A central theme of the book is that there are always viable alternatives to prolonged economic failure. Drawing on the history of other financial crises, recessions, and recoveries, the book argues that regardless of initial conditions, there have been and remain economically feasible alternatives to austerity for governments of the hardest-hit countries in the eurozone. Another even more prolonged neoliberal economic failure, largely unnoticed, was experienced by the vast majority of the world’s low- and middle-income countries in the last two decades of the twentieth century. This failure and its social consequences, as well as the subsequent recovery in the first decade of the twenty-first century, are examined, as is the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its subsequent historic—but mostly ignored—loss of influence in middle-income countries. Finally, the book looks at the causes and consequences of Latin America’s “second independence” and economic rebound in the twentieth century, including important changes in economic and foreign policy by various governments.