Zombie Economics:How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us

[RamboLiberal]

Paul Krugman mentions in 12/20/10 column: To borrow the title of a recent book by the Australian economist John Quiggin on doctrines that the crisis should have killed but didn’t, we’re still — perhaps more than ever — ruled by “zombie economics.” Why?

Part of the answer, surely, is that people who should have been trying to slay zombie ideas have tried to compromise with them instead. And this is especially, though not only, true of the president.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/opinion/20krugman.html?_r=1&hp

In the graveyard of economic ideology, dead ideas still stalk the land.

The recent financial crisis laid bare many of the assumptions behind market liberalism--the theory that market-based solutions are always best, regardless of the problem. For decades, their advocates dominated mainstream economics, and their influence created a system where an unthinking faith in markets led many to view speculative investments as fundamentally safe. The crisis seemed to have killed off these ideas, but they still live on in the minds of many--members of the public, commentators, politicians, economists, and even those charged with cleaning up the mess. In Zombie Economics, John Quiggin explains how these dead ideas still walk among us--and why we must find a way to kill them once and for all if we are to avoid an even bigger financial crisis in the future.

Zombie Economics takes the reader through the origins, consequences, and implosion of a system of ideas whose time has come and gone. These beliefs--that deregulation had conquered the financial cycle, that markets were always the best judge of value, that policies designed to benefit the rich made everyone better off--brought us to the brink of disaster once before, and their persistent hold on many threatens to do so again. Because these ideas will never die unless there is an alternative, Zombie Economics also looks ahead at what could replace market liberalism, arguing that a simple return to traditional Keynesian economics and the politics of the welfare state will not be enough--either to kill dead ideas, or prevent future crises.

John Quiggin is professor of economics at the University of Queensland in Australia.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9270.html

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[AndyTiedye]

2. Zombies Have a Working Majority in Congress, and Have Had for Years

Add the "blue dogs" to the Republicans, which is what usually happens when it really matters, and you have a Republican majority.

Democrats only have a majority on paper, and in the House we are losing even that.

Our party never really recovered from the Reagan presidency.
Reagan destroyed the unions, which used to be our base,
and he did away with the Fairness Doctrine, largely eliminating our access to the media.

[daleanime]

3. Too true...

:dem:

[Davis_X_Machina]

4. Read, and recommended.

The chapter on the equity premium and privatization alone make it worth reading.

[charlie]

5. This batch of zombies is harder to kill than Freddy Krueger

Here Quiggin is agog over an idiot paper by Casey Mulligan of (where else?) Chicago, assigning cause of the depression to market anticipation of Obama Socialism.

Subprimes, CDOs, CDSs have vanished into never-were land. Market perspicacity is ever infallible, ever triumphant.

Fucking cultists.

http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2010/02/26/zombie-economics-gets-a-mulligan-or-how-obamacare-caused-the-global-financial-crisis