… for the first book review to come in, and happily, it’s a good one, from Buttonwood, who has long been my favorite columnist/blogger at The Economist.
Get more news as it happens on
http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Zombie-Economics-by-John-Quiggin/123348251033799?v=wall&ref=ts
John Quiggin 
like an expectant father…
Congrats on the good review, John. I hope the book gets widely read.
Congrats John. Can’t wait to read it.
Are you going to let us know how to get this book? after all we are like the expectant fathers family
I’m sure anyone who who gives such a glowing review as Buttonwood would become your favourite Economist contributor even if he wasn’t beforehand John 😉
Can’t wait to read the book!
@Chris Dodds
Yeah – when can we get a copy?
Interesting that a good many comments show a few zombies still staggering around in people’s heads (eg quantity theories of money, government is the problem, the austrians had the answer…). Sigh.
Can we buy a signed copy?
The two quotes sum it up. Neolib ignores rather than incorporates human complexity and the human capacity to adapt or adjust.
Neolib actually is a very old type of economics, obviously developed prior to pomo critiqes and incapable of functioning outside an ideological context, based on unproven and unprovable precepts. It fails to consider andfalsify its own precepts and preconditons, for example in the unquestioned notion of Cornucopia.
Very bourgeois, self referential and self lobotomising and cant conceive of a”good life” for its subjects.
As put by the critic, Quiggin takes the next step, bypasses the Aristotelian notion that the civilisation process is complete rather than commencing and so ends the passivism of neolib relative to change and status quo in favour of engagement in a world where actually so much needs and could be done, and offers a challenge rather than a bromide, for activity.
the foundation brick is not the whole edifice, where do we go from here and are not the possibilities endless and exciting for, actually, our as yet anything but very perfect world.
as the testimonial says,”joyful, hearty”, life’s for living, and people are defined in action, not stasis.
I rather liked one of the commenters who suggested certain economic policy is adopted and promoted only to protect vested interests (whether it decimates an economy and impoverishes its citizens or adds to hgardship and causes unemployment to rise is not for consideration. The best way to ensure that no close consideration of negative economic outcomes occurs is to kill the study of economic history and distort statistical measures over time such as the unemployment rate to hide the evidence that policies are not working well).
Galbraith was very much aware of the “career economists” who stalked the corridors of power and ensured the promotion of their own ilk decades ago. Chicago Uni, I suspect equipped rather a lot of them.
@Alice
hum: ” kill the study of economic history”?
did milton friedman write any books on economic history, to your knowledge?
stigler was a historian of economic thought.
can you name any major university of chicago economists who accepted a washington job? a list should be easy to write.
@Alice
see also http://johnbtaylorsblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/opinions-versus-facts-about-chicago.html
lists the PhD backgrounds of the council of economic advisors since 1946
also notes that all assistant secretaries of Treasury for Economic Policy appointed during the Bush 43 and Obama Administrations had PhDs from Harvard. During the same period, except for Don Kohn and Susan Bies, all PhD economists appointed to the Federal Reserve Board were from Cambridge MA.
@Jim Rose
JR are you cyber shadowing me? Every time I make a post up you pop!
Zealots tend to do that.