When leadership advice feels like buzzwords and platitudes, it's time to get real.

HPR's podcast Coaching Real Leaders brings you behind closed doors as Muriel Wilkins coaches anonymous

leaders through raw honest career questions

that we all face.

Listen and follow coaching real leaders for free

wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the H-Bere Idea cast from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Mark Blife,

professor at Brown University

and author of the new book austerity,

the history of a dangerous idea. Mark, thanks for coming in.

It's very nice to be here. So in your preface, you write that austerity as a route to growth

and as the correct response to the aftermath of a financial crisis does not pass the sniff test

and actually use some more colorful language but I'm going to stick to that version for

now so I'd like to get into some of the reasons why and why if it's such a bad idea we keep coming back to it.

But first I'd like to start with where we are now and the problem we're currently trying

to use austerity to solve which is debt.

Specifically you have written that the debt crisis in Europe is not really

a sovereign debt crisis, even though we're all calling at that. So let's start there and tell

us what it really is. Okay.

Let's jump in halfway in, but let's see if I can do that and then backpedal to why it's a bad idea and then

go forward.

...