Welcome to the Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and

I'm broadcasting from AS-220 in Providence, Rhode Island.

This week we're recording in front of a big audience.

My guest today wasn't surprised by Trump or Brexit or the crises spreading

across the European continent.

In fact, he predicted them all.

The neoliberal economic and political order,

obsessively dedicated to eliminating inflation and maximizing profits,

is in crisis, and so is the political establishment that built, maintained and defended it.

Mark Blythe, a native of Dundee Scotland, grew up, as he put it, in in relative poverty in a very real sense a welfare kid.

Today he's a professor of political economy at Brown.

Probabilistically speaking he writes I am as an extreme example of intergenerational

social mobility as you can find anywhere.

Blithe is the author of great transformationsations, Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the 20th century,

and Austerity, the history of a dangerous idea.

Mark, welcome to the dig.

Thank you.

So you saw Trump coming.

Unlike the pundits who are reading political tea leaves,

you were looking at the political economic

reality and at history. What did you see? So can I start with where I went shopping

today? Sure. So I have my friend Cornell in from out of town. Some of you know Cornell Van. He's here.

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