I am the William R. Rhodes '57 Professor of International Economics and Director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at Brown University. I have appointments in Brown's Watson Institute for International Studies and in the Department of Political Science. I grew up in Dundee, Scotland. I received my PhD in political science from Columbia University in 1999 and taught at the Johns Hopkins University from 1997 until 2009.
My research interests lie in the of field international and comparative political economy and aims to be as interdisciplinary as possible, drawing from political science, economics, sociology, complexity theory and evolutionary theory. My work falls into several related areas: the politics of ideas, how institutions change, macroeconomic regimes and growth models, and why people believe certain economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.
| Blyth, Mark Lonergan, Eric. Angrynomics. Columbia University Press, 2020. |
| Blyth, Mark Chappe, Raphael. "Hocus Pocus: Debating the Age of Magic Money." Foreign Affairs, no. Nov/Dec 2020, 2020. |
| A New Financial Geopolitics? The U.S. Led Monetary Order in a Time of Turbulence. edited by Blyth, Mark Maxfield, Sylvia, foreign affairs, 2018. |
| Oren, Tami, Blyth, Mark. "From Big Bang to Big Crash: The Early Origins of the UK’s Finance-led Growth Model and the Persistence of Bad Policy Ideas." New Political Economy, 2018, pp. 1-18. |
| Hopkin, Jonathan, Blyth, Mark. "The Global Economics of European Populism: Growth Regimes and Party System Change in Europe (The Government and Opposition/Leonard Schapiro Lecture 2017)." Government and Opposition, 2018, pp. 1-33. |
| "When is it Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility." Perspectives on Politics, 2018. |
| Blyth, Mark, Matthijs, Matthias. "Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy." Review of International Political Economy, vol. 24, no. 2, 2017, pp. 203-231. |
| Blyth, Mark. "After the Brits Have Gone and the Trumpets Have Sounded: Turning a Drama into a Crisis That Will Not Go to Waste." Intereconomics, vol. 51, no. 6, 2016, pp. 324-331. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Policies to overcome stagnation: the crisis, and the possible futures, of all things euro." European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Intervention, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 215-228. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The New Ideas Scholarship in the Mirror of Historical Institutionalism: A Case of Old Whines in New Bottles?." Journal of European Public Policy, vol. 23, no. 3, 2015, pp. 464-471. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Austerity as ideology: A reply to my critics." Comparative European Politics, vol. 11, no. 6, 2013, pp. 737-751. |
| Wang, Qingxin K., Blyth, Mark. "Constructivism and the study of international political economy in China." Review of International Political Economy, vol. 20, no. 6, 2013, pp. 1276-1299. |
| Abdelal, Rawi, Blyth, Mark. "Just who put you in charge? We did: CRAs and the politics of ratings." Ranking the World, 2013, pp. 39-59. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The Audacity of Despair." Dissent, vol. 60, no. 4, 2013, pp. 112-115. |
| Ban, Cornel, Blyth, Mark. "The BRICs and the Washington Consensus: An introduction." Review of International Political Economy, vol. 20, no. 2, 2013, pp. 241-255. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economic Ideas in Two Moments of Crisis." Governance, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012, pp. 197-215. |
| Hopkin, Jonathan, Blyth, Mark. "What can Okun teach Polanyi? Efficiency, regulation and equality in the OECD." Review of International Political Economy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-33. |
| BLYTH, MARK, HODGSON, GEOFFREY M., LEWIS, ORION, STEINMO, SVEN. "Introduction to the Special Issue on the Evolution of Institutions." Journal of Institutional Economics, vol. 7, no. 03, 2011, pp. 299-315. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The Ghosts of Corporatism's Past and Past Corporatisms: Commentary on Three Articles." Capitalism and Society, vol. 5, no. 3, 2011. |
| Blyth, Mark. "COPING WITH THE BLACK SWAN: THE UNSETTLING WORLD OF NASSIM TALEB." Critical Review, vol. 21, no. 4, 2009, pp. 447-465. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Torn Between Two Lovers? Caught in the Middle of British and American IPE1." New Political Economy, vol. 14, no. 3, 2009, pp. 329-336. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The Politics of Compounding Bubbles: The Global Housing Bubble in Comparative Perspective." Comparative European Politics, vol. 6, no. 3, 2008, pp. 387-406. |
| Widmaier, Wesley W., Blyth, Mark, Seabrooke, Leonard. "Exogenous Shocks or Endogenous Constructions? The Meanings of Wars and Crises." Int Studies Q, vol. 51, no. 4, 2007, pp. 747-759. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Powering, Puzzling, or Persuading? The Mechanisms of Building Institutional Orders." Int Studies Q, vol. 51, no. 4, 2007, pp. 761-777. |
| BLYTH, MARK. "Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science." APSR, vol. 100, no. 04, 2006, pp. 493. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Domestic Institutions and the Possibility of Social Democracy." Comparative European Politics, vol. 3, no. 4, 2005, pp. 379-407. |
| Blyth, Mark, Katz, Richard. "From Catch-all Politics to Cartelisation: The Political Economy of the Cartel Party." West European Politics, vol. 28, no. 1, 2005, pp. 33-60. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The Futures of European Capitalism." Perspectives on Politics, vol. 2, no. 03, 2004. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The great transformation in understanding Polanyi: Reply to Hejeebu and Mccloskey." Critical Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2004, pp. 117-133. |
| Blyth, Mark. "AN APPROACH TO COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OR A SUBFIELD WITHIN A SUBFIELD?." Comparative Politics, 2003, pp. 193-219. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Same as it Never Was: Temporality and Typology in the Varieties of Capitalism." Comparative European Politics, vol. 1, no. 2, 2003, pp. 215-225. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Structures Do Not Come with an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas, and Progress in Political Science." Perspectives on Politics, vol. 1, no. 04, 2003. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Great Transformations." [], 2002. |
| Blyth, Mark. "The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict, and Institutional Change." World Politics, vol. 54, no. 01, 2001, pp. 1-26. |
| Blyth, Mark. "Moving the Political Middle: Redefining the Boundaries of State Action." The Political Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 3, 1997, pp. 231-240. |
The Politics of Ideas
Growing up in the UK under Mrs. Thatcher, the politics of ideas, that is, how politics alters peoples' conceptions of what they should want, was always on the TV screen or on the front pages of the newspapers. Yet when I came to grad school in the US, the idea that how people think about the world may matter for how they act in it was treated with deep suspicion (and still is in some quarters). Here, interests - unproblematic, given, and transitive - were the order of the day. I'd like to think that my work has moved the debate along a bit in that regard. A few key publications in this area are:
"Any More Bright Ideas? The Ideational Turn of Comparative Political Economy." Comparative Politics 29 (1) January 1997 pp. 229-250.
"The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict and Institutional Change" World Politics 54 (1) October 2001 pp. 1-26.
"Structures do not Come with an Instruction Sheet: Interests, Ideas and Progress in Political Science," Perspectives on Politics 1 (4), December 2003 pp. 695-703.
"Ideas, Uncertainty and Evolution," in Robert Cox and Daniel Beland (eds.) in Robert Cox and Daniel Beland (eds.) Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research, Oxford University Press, 2011.
“Paradigms and Paradox: The Politics of Economics Ideas in Two Moments of Crisis.” Governance, 26 (4) December 2012.
“Austerity as Ideology: A Reply to my Critics,” Comparative European Politics, 11 (6) December 2013: 737-751.
“The Austerity Delusion: How a Dangerous Idea Won Over the West,” Foreign Affairs, April/May 2013: 41-56.
“When is it Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility,” Perspectives on Politics. Volume 16 (1) March 2018, pp. 110-126. https://doi:10.1017/S1537592717002171 - Awarded the APSA European Politics Section Best Paper for 2018
How Institutions Change
Part of my fascination with ideas, apart from trying to understand what made Mrs. Thatcher appealing to millions of people who were made worse off by her policies (if you don't believe me check the UK inequality stats) was a puzzle within the so-called 'new institutionalist' literature in political science, which was all the rage when I was at grad school. Specifically, if people get their preferences from their institutional context, then where do they get the preference to change that context? My answers also have to do with ideas and can be found below.
Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002).
"Domestic Institutions and the Possibility of Social Democracy" Comparative European Politics, 3 (4) December (2005) pp. 379-407.
"When Liberalisms Change: Comparing the Politics of Deflations and Inflations," in Arthur T. Denzau, Thomas C. Willett, and Ravi K. Roy (eds.) Neoliberalism: National and Regional Experiments with Global Ideas (London and New York: Routledge 2006)
"Beyond the Usual Suspects: Ideas, Uncertainty, and Building Institutional Orders" Contribution to a special issue of International Studies Quarterly, 51 (4) December 2007 pp. 761-777.
"The Secret Life of Institutions: On the Role of Ideas in Evolving Economic Systems" Revue de la Régulation: Capitalisme, Institutions, Pouvoirs. n°3/4, novembre 2008, pp: 1-11.
“Introduction to the Special Issue on the Evolution of Institutions” with Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Orion Lewis, Sven Steinmo, The Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 7 (3) September 2011, pp. 1-17.
“The BRICs and the Washington Consensus: An Introduction,” Special Issue of the Review of International Political Economy, ‘Dreaming with the BRICs,’ 20 (2) April 2013: 241-255 (with Cornel Ban).
How Disciplines Change
Related to my work on how institutions change is a fun sideline on how academic fields change. By this I mean the self-understandings academics have of their own work and how the fields of knowledge they are part of evolve and change over time.
"The State of the Discipline in American Political Science: Be Careful What You Wish For?" British Journal of Politics and International Relations 1 (3) October 1999 pp. 345-365 (with Robin Varghese).
"Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science" American Political Science Review 100 (4) November (2006) pp. 493-498.
"An Approach to Comparative Analysis, or a Sub-Field Within a Sub-Field? Political Economy," in Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman (eds.), Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
"Torn Between Two Lovers: Caught in the Middle of British and American IPE" New Political Economy, 14 (3) (2009): 329-336.
“Constructivism and the Study of International Political Economy in China,” Review of International Political Economy, 20 (6) December 2013: 1276-1299 (with Qingxin K. Wang).
"Ideas and Historical Institutionalism," forthcoming in Fioretos (et. al., Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Histiorical Institutionalism (2014).
Political Parties
If my work on ideas (and institutions) was an attempt to work out what made Mrs. Thatcher possible, then my work on political parties was my attempt to understand what made Blair, Schroeder and Clinton and the current populist moment possible.
"Globalization and the Limits of Democratic Choice: Social Democracy and the Rise of Political Cartelization" Internationale Politik und Gesellschaft 6 (3) (July) 2003 pp. 60-82.
"Domestic Institutions and the Possibility of Social Democracy" Comparative European Politics, 3 (4) December (2005) pp. 379-407.
"From Catch all Politics to Cartelization: The Political Economy of the Cartel Party" Western European Politics Vol. 28 (1) January 2005, pp. 34-61 (with Richard S. Katz).
“The Global Economics of European Populism: Growth Regimes and Party System Change in Europe,” Government and Opposition, with Jonathan Hopkin. Published on line December 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/gov.2018.43
The Politics of Finance (and Governing Complex Systems)
Given the recent global financial crisis there has been an explosion of interest in this area. My interest here is a bit more longstanding.
Following the dot-com burst and the demise of the hedge fund LTCM I became interested in how banks and the like think about risk. And the more I looked into this the more worried I got. I published a piece back in 2003, which suggested that LTCM was just the beginning and that the way banks calculate risk was going to blow up the world. Nothing of the sort happened. And then the world blew up. I am also interested in finance because it's a great example of how humans deal with complex systems -
badly.
"The Political Power of Financial Ideas: Transparency, Risk and Distribution in Global Finance" in Jonathan Kirshner (ed.) Monetary Orders (Cornell University Press 2003) pp. 239-259.
"The Politics of Compounding Bubbles: The Global Housing Bubble in Comparative Perspective." Comparative European Politics, Fall 2008, pp. 387-406.
“What if Most Swans are Black? The Unsettling World of Nassim Taleb” Critical Review, January 2010.
“The Black Swan of Cairo: How Suppressing Volatility Makes the World Less Predictable and More Dangerous” Foreign Affairs, 90 (3) April 2011 (with Nassim Taleb).
“This Time It is Really Different: Europe, the Financial Crisis, and Staying on Top in the Twenty-First Century,” in Daniel Breznitz and John Zysman (eds.) The Third Globalization: Can Wealthy Nations Stay Rich in the Twenty-First Century? (New York: Oxford University Press 2013).
“Print Less but Transfer More: Why Central Banks Should Give Money Directly to the People.” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014 (with Eric Lonergan).
“From Big Bang to Big Crash: The Early Origins of the UK’s Finance-led Growth Model and the Persistence of Bad Policy Ideas,” New Political Economy, with Tami Oren. Published online May 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2018.1473355
“Hocus Pocus: A Response to Mallaby’s ‘The Era of Magic Money.” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020.
The Persistence of 'Bad' Economic Ideas
Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2013) which interrogates the return to prominence of the ideas of financial orthodoxy following the global financial crisis. Austerity has been translated into 16 languages.
The Future of the Euro (with Matthias Matthijs) (eds.) with Oxford University Press.
Related to this topic are the following pieces:
“When is it Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility,” Perspectives on Politics. Volume 16 (1) March 2018, pp. 110-126. https://doi:10.1017/S1537592717002171
“Austerity as Ideology: A Reply to my Critics,” Comparative European Politics, 11 (6) December 2013: 737-751.
“The Austerity Delusion: How a Dangerous Idea Won Over the West,” Foreign Affairs, April/May 2013: 41-56.
How Countries Grow (or fail to do so)
I have most recently become intersted in how globalization encourages different 'growth models' in different places. I have a forthcoming book called The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (with Lucio Bacaro and Jonas Pontusson (eds.)) coming out in 2022 with Oxford.
“Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the Mystery of IPE’s Missing Macro-Economy,” TheReview of International Political Economy, 24 (2) (2017) pp. 203-231, with Matthias Matthijs. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2017.1308417
“After the Brits Have Gone: How to Turn a Drama into a Crisis that Will Not go to Waste.” The Review of European Economic Policy, 50thAnniversary Issue, Winter 2016.
“Policies to Overcome Stagnation: The Crisis, and the Possible Futures, of All Things Euro.” European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies, Vol. 13 No. 2, 2016, pp. 215–228.
“Capitalism in Crisis: What Went Wrong and What Comes Next” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2016.
| Year | Degree | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 1999 | PhD | Columbia University |
| 1994 | MPhil | Columbia University |
| 1992 | MA | Columbia University |
| 1990 | BA | Strathclyde University |
Society for Women in International Political Economy (SWIPE) of the International Study Association's International Political Economy section, 2022 SWIPE Award for Mentoring Women in International Political Economy.
Awarded the Open Society Individual Scholar Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations, August 2019.
Awarded the 2018 European Politics Section of the American Political Science Association’s Best Paper published in 2017-2018
Recipient of the 2014 Hans-Matthöfer-Preis für Wirtschaftspublizistik, “Wirtschaft. Weiter. Denken,” by the Matthöfer and Friedrich Ebert Foundations, Berlin, Germany, for Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Member - Council for Foreign Relations
Board Member - The JFK Institute at the Free University of Berlin
| EMBA 2400 - Global Markets |
| IAPA 0700 - The Political Economy of Hard Policy Problems |
| IAPA 1801K - From Growth to the Green Transition |
| PLCY 2055 - The Politics of Policymaking in Comparative Perspective |
| PLCY 2730 - The Political Economy of Hard Policy Problems |
| POLS 1420 - Money and Power in the International Political Economy |
| POLS 1822B - Foundations of Political Economy |
| POLS 1822G - The Political Economy of Hard Policy Problems |
| POLS 2050 - Preparing the Prospectus I |
| POLS 2051 - Preparing the Prospectus II |
| POLS 2160 - International Political Economy |
| POLS 2215 - Comparative Political Economy |
