Mark Blyth

Mark Blyth is Professor of International Political Economy at Brown. He says: “I grew up in relative poverty, in a very real sense 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.”

“The only way the government could explain why suddenly they had to cut all this spending and why they didn’t have any money. They couldn’t say, well we just gave it all to the bankers and basically the investor class to bail out their investments. There had to be a narrative of justification, a narrative of blame. ”

— Mark Blyth

Mark talks to Project Twist-It about how the historical narratives of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor became ‘turbo-charged’ during the Reagan/Thatcher years and, most recently, under austerity.