Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics and the Director of the Rhodes Centre for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a joint appointment in the department of political science. He is the author many award-winning books including, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), Angrynomics (New York: Columbia University Press 2020), Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (Oxford University Press 2022), and forthcoming in 2025, Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers. He writes about the politics of growth, distribution and decarbonization and why people continue to believe dubious economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary.
Blyth’s research spans three main areas. The first focuses on the political power of economic ideas as seen in his books, "Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century" (2002) and "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea" (2013) and Angrynomics" (2020) with Eric Lonergan, The second concerns the political economy of rich democracies as seen in his 2015 books, "The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation" (2022), with Lucio Bacarro and Jonas Pontusson, and in his forthcoming book "Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers" (2025). The third focuses upon the distributional politics of decarbonization and the future of the US dollar. This is the subject of his current book manuscript, “Burning Down the House.”
Book: Inflation: A Guide for Winners and Losers (New York: Norton 2025), co-authored with Nicolo Fraccaroli.
“Macrofinance and the Green Transformation: Nudging, Attracting, and Coercing Capital Towards Decarbonization,” Introduction to the Special Issue on Derisking and Decarbonization, Review of International Political Economy (forthcoming in 2025)
“Labour’s Search for Credibility,” The Institute for Public Policy Research Review, 30 (2) (2023): 139-144. https://doi.org/10.1111/newe.12347
“How Should we Think about Modern Capitalism? A Growth Models Approach,” (with Lucio Bacarro and Jonas Pontusson), Transfer: European Review of Labor and Research, 28 (4) (2023) https://doi.org/10.1177/10242589221149512
“Brexit and the ties that bind: how global finance shapes city-level growth models,” with Aiden Ragan and Nicolo Fraccaroli, European Journal of Public Policy 30 (10) (2023). https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2023.2176531
Graduate: Comparative Political Economy Survey of the comparative capitalisms literature from to early work on strong and weak states through globalization to the literature on labor and central banks and finally growth models and regime theory.
Graduate: International Political Economy Graduate survey of the evolution of IPE as a field. Topics covered include trade, finance, global governance, and distribution.
Undergraduate: From Growth to the Green Transition Senior seminar that examines the intellectual and policy history of economic growth. The course surveys the standard literature on growth and reads that against recent interventions on de-growth, Green Growth, and other alternative understandings of economic wellbeing.
Undergraduate: The Political Economy of Hard Policy Problems Lecture class that deals with those issues that governments would like to (perhaps) do something about but find that it’s really hard to do something about it. Topics covered include economic Growth, Inherited Wealth, Inequality, Social Mobility, Money in Politics, Rent-Seeking in Finance, and the distributional politics of Austerity.
Undergraduate: Money and Power in the IPE Undergraduate Lecture course based around the monetary systems of the 20th and 21st Centuries from the Gold Standard to Bitcoin.
International Studies Association, International Political Economy Section, Distinguished Scholar Award, April 2024.
SWIPE Award for Mentoring Women in International Political Economy, Society for Women in International Political Economy (SWIPE) of the International Study Association's International Political Economy Section, 2022
Awarded the 2018 European Politics Section of the American Political Science Association’s Best Paper published in 2017-2018.
Awarded the 2014 Hans Matthöffer Wirtschaftspublizistik-Preis, “Wirtschaft. Weiter. Denken,” by the Matthöffer and Friedrich Ebert Foundations, Berlin, Germany.
Nominated for American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, DAAD Prize, 2014.