Mark Blyth is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He holds a joint appointment in the department of political science.
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" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) and "Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea" (New York: Oxford University Press 2015) and Angrynomics" (New York: Columbia University Press 2020). The second concerns the political economy of rich democracies as seen in his 2015 books "The Future of the Euro" (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), with Matthias Matthijs, "The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation" (Oxford University Press 2022), with Lucio Bacarro and Jonas Pontusson, and in his forthcoming book "Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers" (New York: Norton 2025)
“Labour’s Search for Credibility,” The Institute for Public Policy Research Review, 30 (2) (2023): 139-144. 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) 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
“In Search of Varieties of Capitalism: Hardly Perennial or Troublesome Weed,” Review of Keynesian Economics (Summer 2022), with Mark Herman Schwartz, doi.org/10.4337/roke.2022.02.02
“Hocus Pocus: A Response to Mallaby’s, ‘The Era of Magic Money.” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020.
“The Global Economics of European Populism: Growth Regimes and Party System Change in Europe,” Government and Opposition, vol. 54, no. 2, April 2019 pp. 193-225, with Jonathan Hopkin. doi.org/10.1017/gov.2018.43
“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. doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2018.1473355
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.
APSA European Politics Section Best Paper Award 2018: “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