Tales of austerity, and a crisis of wealth distribution

Abstract

In this chapter I argue that austerity is not primarily designed to solve an economic crisis, but rather to solve a crisis of wealth distribution. This fact has been hidden by political framing strategies that present austerity as either an appropriate technical solution, or as morally justified. Austerity is a neoliberal strategy to preserve an institutional pattern of wealth distribution, one that favours owners of capital under conditions of a shrinking economic surplus. Drawing upon social stratification theory, this chapter theorizes a capitalist economic crisis as primarily a socio-political distributional crisis, thereby sharpening into view the fundamental issue at stake. When seen through a lens of social stratification, austerity works extremely well. Consequently, framing austerity as a technical and moral issue is therefore strategic. It follows from the fact that in order to dictate the socio-political response to a crisis of distribution, a group must be able to provide the dominant framing of the nature of the crisis and its logical solution (Sum & Jessop, 2013). This chapter conducts a critical discourse analysis of a major Irish news medium, the Irish Times, between Jan 2009 and Dec 2010. The aim is to assess who had access to influential opinion articles discussing Ireland's economic crisis, how these commentators framed the crisis and its solution, and finally how these opinion pieces relate to actual economic theory.