Before becoming an academic Blyth has been variously, a stand-up comedian, a chef, and a funk bass player. Realizing that such pursuits where long options at best, he finished his PhD. in political science at Columbia University in 1999. He then joined the Johns Hopkins University before moving to Brown University in 2009. His research focuses upon the causes of stability and change in the economy and why people continue to believe stupid economic ideas despite buckets of evidence to the contrary. The power of economic ideas is a common theme in Blyth’s work, as seen in his award-winning Book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015) and in his new projects on the economic legacies of the baby boomers and the politics of low growth. When not writing, he still likes to cook, and he recently has become a serious cocktail mixologist, which eases the pain of the stuff he writes about.
