W. W. Norton & Company Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

What a disappointment. Did you need money professor? This book is just a collection of article form disgruntled radicalised person. It is so sad. I also went to listen to his presentation of the book in Londo. Very superficial and without any insight apart from keeping on repeating "populism is bad it will end very badly"

Why has this collection of essays (some going right back to the year 2000 if memory serves) been issued in the year 2020 in hardback format at a hardback price? Cui bono? Readers who would have been pleased to buy it in paperback will be put off by not just the price but also the clumsy heavyweight shape and size. The author is my own favourite among today’s economists, and I have to wonder what he really thought of this particular exercise in print economics.Still, it’s Krugman, and so I won’t reduce my rating below 4 stars, for that simple reason. And it’s not as if that is my only gripe. The short essays that make up most of the volume often give us dogmatic statements or conclusions without at least a potted synopsis of the reasoning. Saying that such-and-such ‘doesn’t work’ or calling up some hypothetical majority of Americans in support of some favoured view, is just doing, and doing repeatedly, what he castigates someone for who purported to detect a view common to ‘economists’. Now THAT would be some consensus all right! However you might feel that our hero comes rather close to finding it for himself at times.Anyhow, Krugman’s disciples will no doubt be glad to find his usual targets wittily despatched. Perhaps the zombie-in-chief is our old enemy Austerity, the undead phantom that thinks it is the true answer to the problems encountered by deflated and weakened economies. There is no doubt that that doctrine is deeply rooted in popular belief. I wonder how many books, even hardbacks, will be needed to root it out: just recently the sombre sage John F Weeks issued an entire book by the title The Debt Delusion. I wouldn’t call that a book too many, so I guess we should just keep trying. Other zombies, aunt sallies or what you will, take their turn on the stage here. I rather liked Krugman’s pithy response to right-wing believers for whom subsidised medicine is some road to serfdom. It should not have needed Krugman to point out that neither Stalinist communism nor Maoist China arose from social democracy as widely practised in Europe. Those had other origins entirely. However it always helps to have Krugman tell our story for us, not least when he also reminds us that Venezuala had been a corrupt petrostate well before Chavez came along with his disastrous nationalisations.This pundit’s likes and dislikes, the latter particularly, receive a good deal of treatment from him. His view of the Republican party is more or less totally unfavourable, and when it comes to, say, the unpleasing Speaker Ryan, it’s not hard to go along with him. Krugman does not come across to me as any kind of doctrinaire Democrat – indeed he says himself that the Democratic party is more of a loose coalition than its Republican rival. Krugman is generally well disposed to Mr Obama (with qualifications) but he is interestingly enthusiastic for Mrs Pelosi, and that is a point of view that Europeans or Brits are probably not very familiar with, myself included. However he remains first and foremost an economist rather than a politician -- and indeed he favours us with a longish but interesting account of how he came to work in the way he does, from origins as a historian more than as a scientist. So sure enough, it is in economics that he finds his guiding star, none other than Keynes. When I read Weeks’s The Debt Delusion I remember wondering why Weeks, with his obvious leaning towards deficit financing, did not even mention the daddy of the deficit financing school, Keynes. Well, there’s no want here of honourable mentions of the high priest of economics in the post-war era.Krugman rightly lays stress on the moderate cast of Keynes’s theories, but this time the odd omission is of the brightest star in the post-Keynes firmament, John Kenneth Galbraith. I can’t help finding it plain odd not to find him mentioned, not even in the index. I even recalled that Galbraith stood something like seven feet in height, whereas at one point Mr Krugman refers to his own lack of inches. Surely that can have nothing to do with the matter – surely not?

Was delighted to learn that there was a new Krugman - it arrived yesterday - seemked like good reading for a wet Sunday in front of a nice fire; but frankly it might as well have gone on the fire. Very repetitious and many of the individual articles simply cannot take the reasonable burden of expectations. Krugman is 'distinguished' but this is not a distinguished collection of pieces. What a disappointment.

This is a great collection of US economist Paul Krugman’s articles in the New York Times since 2004. Many focus on the 2007-8 crash, and the counter-productive policy responses of various governments.He is especially scathing about the EU’s failings. He observes that the EU’s leaders “have spent a quarter-century trying to run Europe on the basis of fantasy economics.”Krugman points out, “When the predicted and predictable strains on the euro began, Europe’s policy response was to impose draconian austerity on debtor nations - and to deny the simple logic and historical evidence indicating that such policies would inflict terrible economic damage while failing to achieve the promised debt reduction. … trying to deal with large debts through austerity alone – in particular, while simultaneously pursuing a hard-money policy – has never worked. It didn’t work for Britain after World War I, despite immense sacrifices; why would anyone expect it to work for Greece?”And, “The depression was made worse by an elite consensus, in the teeth of the evidence, that the root of Europe’s troubles was not misaligned costs but fiscal profligacy, and that the solution was draconian austerity that made the depression even worse.”

The problem with the political right of recent history is not that they don’t think like the left, or that they operate according to a different political philosophy. The problem is that the right has no qualms about presenting intentionally misleading and false information to achieve political gains at all costs (The left at times can do this too, of course, but not nearly to the extent of the right.)Since the right operates according to a very simplistic platform, they are ideologically wedded to very simplistic economic policies that, despite years of contradictory evidence, they simply refuse to abandon. That’s why they continue to push for tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and further privatization, which are all the causes of, not the solution to, most of today’s major economic problems and growing levels of inequality.What’s more is that the right is not only pushing bad ideas; they’re also pretending to not be. They seek to cut Medicare and other critical social programs while promising the opposite, and they make claims that their political opponents spread false information while they blithely do the same.In this collection of essays, Krugman is not afraid to call out this massive disingenuity or to discuss the underlying motives of the modern right. While you’re not going to find in-depth technical analysis of economic policy in these articles, you will come to understand the motives and history behind the intellectual black hole that is the modern conservative movement.