In The Profligate Colonial (Cornell, 2025) Lisandro Claudio (South & Southeast Asian Studies) reveals how austerity, long before it became a buzzword of modern technocracy, was a tool of US empire.
Austerity is often praised as prudence in hard times, a responsible response to crisis. In the Philippines today, it is treated as common sense, an unquestioned commitment to a strong currency, low inflation, and fiscal restraint. 

Claudio argues that this orthodoxy is in fact a colonial inheritance — a legacy of American rule that cast Filipinos as reckless spenders and imposed monetary discipline as a civilizing force. At the center of this logic is the "profligate colonial," a feminized, racialized figure who wastes public funds and so requires the steady hand of imperial governance.

He is joined by Trevor Jackson (History).