The winner will receive a hardcover copy of the book Debtor's Prison: The Politics of Austerily Versus Possibility.

One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of
today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, andshrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economiccrisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year.

In making his case, Kuttner uncovers the double standards in the politics of debt, from Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s campaign for debt forgiveness in the seventeenth century to the two world wars and Bretton Woods. Just as debtors’ prisons once prevented individuals from surmounting their debts and resuming productive life, austerity measures shackle, rather than restore, economic growth—as the weight of past debt crushes the economy’s future potential. Above all, Kuttner shows how austerity serves only the interest of creditors—the very bankers and financial elites whose actions precipitated the collapse. Lucid, authoritative, provocative—a book that will shape the economic conversation and the search for new solutions.