Etched in Marble: Mark Blyth on Writing, Thinking, and Why AI Can’t Save You
Writers on the Forces That Shape Us and the Writing That Endures
Mark Blyth is not the kind of academic who waits to be summoned. His sharp insights, delivered in a no-nonsense Scottish accent, are difficult to ignore. He writes to provoke, to clarify, and, perhaps above all, to care. A professor of International Political Economy at Brown University, Blyth has built a career dismantling bad economic ideas.
In Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Angrynomics, and most recently Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers (with Nicolò Fraccaroli), he has taken apart technocratic orthodoxies and asked the more difficult questions, about power, inequality, and the terms by which society is organized.
In my conversation with Blyth for Etched in Marble, his writing reveals itself not merely as a craft, but as a mode of resistance, a way of thinking aloud and, more crucially, against the grain. For Blyth, the page isn’t a place to polish conclusions, it’s where the real argument begins.
What unfolds is a sharp reflection on clarity, disruption, and why the status quo should never get the last word. We cover everything from the numbing effects of AI and the erosion of attention, to the performance of book-writing, the productive spark of irritation, and his unexpected fondness for PowerPoint.
“Write About What Pisses You Off”
In an academic world shaped by incentives to publish quickly, safely, and in the middle of the disciplinary curve, Blyth’s approach cuts against the grain. When I ask Blyth what makes something worth writing, he doesn’t hesitate. “So my first question is, what pisses you off? What do you care about?” For him, emotional investment isn’t a bonus, it’s a must. “If you’re writing about something you actually care about, the writing will come easy,” he says.
“That’s how you find your voice.” Sometimes that spark is irritation, sometimes fascination, but either way, it’s the engine behind his most resonant work. The writing flows not from detachment, but from the friction of wanting to understand, and wanting others to understand as well.
Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea began not with a hypothesis, he explains, but with a gut feeling that something about the policy consensus just didn’t make sense. “You can smell it when an idea is wrong,” he tells me. “Austerity, for example, just made no sense. And yet it became gospel.”
That contradiction, between policy and logic, between expert consensus and lived reality, was what hooked him. He didn’t set out to write a polemic. He set out to figure out how such a flawed idea became conventional wisdom. And he did it through writing.
The same motivation drove his more recent book on inflation, co-authored with Nicolò Fraccaroli. Once again, the prevailing narratives, about causes, cures, and central banks, seemed disconnected from the actual experience of people living through price shocks. The only way to make sense of it was to go back to the page. “I don’t write to serve a discipline,” he says. “I write to understand what the hell is going on.”
“I Like to Rehearse My Ideas”
For someone who’s made a career critiquing the PowerPoint logic of consultants and economic elites, Blyth’s writing process begins in a place that might surprise you: PowerPoint. “I storyboard books like presentations,” he says. “If I can’t make the case live, in a room, with slides, why would I expect it to work on the page?” The room matters. The audience matters. He tests arguments out loud, talking through structure, tone, and style. “Writing is performative,” he tells me. “But not in the theatrical sense. In the sense that it’s meant for someone. It has to land.”
This connection to performance isn’t just metaphorical for Blyth. In his twenties, he moved to New York from Scotland with a bass guitar and ambitions of becoming a professional musician. His last band, The Electric Company, was “almost something,” before dissolving like so many bands do. “We were all 28, sick of each other, bored,” he laughs. “Bands have a life cycle.”
But the training stuck. “You can’t fake tone,” he says. “You have to practice. It’s all about muscle memory.” For Blyth, writing, like music, is all rhythm, voice, and the discipline to discard what doesn’t land. The habits he honed on stage, listening for what resonates, tightening what doesn’t, carried over to the page. Writing became another kind of performance, not for show this time, but for understanding.
“Grammarly is Death”
This might help explain why Blyth is skeptical of the rise of algorithmic writing tools. In his trademark style, he explains that “Grammarly is death. It flattens everything. It punishes rhythm, surprise, voice.” For Blyth, these tools don’t sharpen thought, they sand it down. They teach us to aim for bland competence, to settle somewhere in the safe middle of the bell curve. But that, he insists, is not where truth lives, and it’s certainly not where anything interesting begins.
He’s just as skeptical of the supposed promise of AI-generated writing. “It doesn’t add to your thinking,” he explains. “It replaces the part where you’re supposed to struggle.” And that struggle, messy, slow, inefficient, is where the good stuff happens. Where meaning happens. “Struggling with sentences is the point,” he says. “That’s how the thinking sharpens.”
“Everyone’s Aiming for the Safe Middle”
As our conversation shifts toward academia, Blyth’s underlying frustrations come into sharper focus. It’s not just the tools that bother him, it’s the shrinking appetite for intellectual risk. “Our discipline [political science] has narrowed,” he says. “Everyone’s aiming for the safe middle. Journals have become hyperspecialized. Nobody wants to miss the next grant call.”
As a result, scholars are often incentivized to follow trends rather than question them, to map gaps in the literature rather than name what’s wrong with the world. This is why Blyth writes more and more for public audiences. “If you want to take intellectual risks, you have to find another space,” he says. Books, in particular, are where he feels he can do that slower, more open-ended thinking.
Still, he’s clear-eyed about the trade-offs. Public writing is faster, and more reactive. Deep work takes time, and silence. “You can’t write four op-eds a week and expect to produce a book with staying power,” he notes. And yet, if you don’t speak into the public conversation at all, the vacuum gets filled by someone else, often someone with less care for nuance and complexity.
“Good Writing Isn’t Magic”
Throughout our conversation, Blyth returns to a single, animating principle: clarity. Not simplification, not consensus, but clarity, the hard-won kind that comes from wrestling with ideas in their full complexity and finding the words that make them legible.
“Good writing isn’t magic,” he says. “It’s labor. It’s in the editing.” He talks about cutting paragraphs, redrafting arguments, sitting with a structure until it clicks. “Lay the bricks, tear them down, rebuild.”
It’s not glamorous. But it’s necessary. And in a time when the speed of content often outpaces the depth of thought, this kind of attention, this refusal to write before we’ve thought something through, feels like an act of resistance.
Etched in Marble: “Thinking Isn’t Passive”
Toward the end of our interview, I ask Blyth the signature question of this series: If you could etch one idea into the marble of our society today, something about thinking and writing that you believe future generations should carry forward, what would it be?
He doesn’t hesitate: “Thinking isn’t passive. Thinking isn’t an act of consumption. Thinking is an act of production that comes through the writing, and writing alone.” It’s a powerful answer, and cuts against the cultural current.
At a time when so much of our intellectual life is flattened into hot takes produced at lightening speed and tailored towards quick consumption, Blyth insists on the opposite. To understand something, you have to write your way into it. This means working through the doubt and friction.
That, to me, is the deeper point. Blyth doesn’t just challenge bad ideas, he challenges the frameworks that make those ideas possible. Writing shouldn’t be a performance, nor a bid for applause. It should be the place where ideas are allowed to find their form. And if we mean to follow in Blyth’s footsteps (though he would likely wave us off) we’ll have to do the work: care enough to step into the argument, and think, really think, not later but now on the page.
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Thank you for reading, sharing, and engaging. Etched in Marble is a series of conversations with writers I admire for thinking deeply, writing bravely, and shaping the world not just through what they say, but how they say it. This series of conversations is part of my Substack, Respect the Marble. If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing. Respect the Marble is a digital place for anyone who cares about how we write, why writing matters, and how finding our voice is a craft. Each post comes with a Skillpower Session: a set of practical notes on writing with clarity, structure, and care.