The Lies We Were Told: Politics, Economics, Austerity and Brexit

by Simon Wren-Lewis

“This is a book you should read, for understanding what went wrong in the past is our only hope of doing better in the future?” - Paul Krugman, Nobel prize-winner Why did governments adopt austerity policies, and why were they so harmful? Why did the media largely ignore the experts who opposed these policies, and allow politicians to get away with lies? And why did voters choose Brexit when the economic consensus was that it would harm living standards? Simon Wren-Lewis, winner of the SPERI/New Statesman Prize for Political Economy, is one of Britain's most respected economists. Since 2012, his widely-read Mainly Macro blog has been an influential resource for policymakers, academics and social commentators around the world. This book presents some of his most important work, telling the story of how the damaging political and economic events of recent years became inevitable.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Economics

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 7, 2018

Reviews

[Dan Sumption · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of the author's blog posts from 2012, split into themes (austerity, the Eurozone crisis, the elections of 2015 and 2017, the media, Brexit, etc) and with occasional postscripts added. The fact that these were not originally written for collection in such a book (and have been only minimally edited for publication) often shows: there is a lot of repetition, and many ideas and assumptions crop up without any introduction or explanation. The book is a worse read as a result, but Wren-Lewis's arguments are strong and his predictions uncannily accurate.