Th e study of class shares (i.e., wage share versus profi t share) provides a clear sense of the losers and winners of austerity, and in turn its political implications. Class shares measure the portion of GDP that goes to labor and to capital— the most immediate indicator of the balance of forces between a society's two main classes. Th e reassertion of capital order, i.e., the primacy of capital over labor, is foundational to promoting capitalist investment: capital does better when workers are subordinated, wages are low, and regulation is minimal. Following World War I, austerity's knack for collapsing the wage share was vital in a moment when the wage share had reached an unprecedented high, stirring among workers great expectations of a breakaway from capitalist exploitation. Th us the political utility of austerity becomes obvious. A rescue of the hierarchical laborcapital split meant an escape from the capitalist crisis (and the egalitarian impulses that came with it) triggered by the Great War.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1471