Intro -- List of figures -- List of tables -- Author Biography -- Foreword by Michael Tanner -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1 The Nature of the European Crisis -- 2 Sweden: Austerity Gone Wrong -- 3 Industrial Poverty -- 4a Europe in 2012: Entering the Economic Wasteland -- 4b Europe in 2012: Deeper into the Crisis -- 5 Can Austerity Work? -- 6 Way Forward -- Index.
Conventional wisdom says that Europe's crisis is a financial crisis. But is this really the case? In Industrial Poverty, economist Sven R. Larson, challenges this view and suggests instead that Europe is in a state of permanent economic decline. Using Sweden in the 1990s as an example, he shows how a welfare-state crisis combined with the wrong kind of austerity policies replaces prosperity with industrial poverty. Today, Europe is going through the same transition into industrial poverty. Tomorrow, it could be the United States, unless Congress and the President take decisive action against the runaway budget deficit.