We Write Blurbs...
For John Quiggin (forthcoming), Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Abraham van Helsing repelled vampires with garlic and killed them with a wooden stake. John Talbot killed werewolves with his silver walking stick (silver bullets came later).
But neither garlic, wooden stake, silver club, nor silver bullet can help economist John Quiggin--for he must struggle against not werewolves or vampires but rather economic zombies: economic ideas that should have died long ago but, undead and animated by malign political and academic spells, still shamble forward. Privatization as the future of government; income inequality as a benign progressive force; financial markets as unchallengeable oracles; blind faith in central bankers; economics as if the world was populated only by people as logical as Mr. Spock--all five of these ideas should be resting peacefully in their graves.
But they are not.
So John Quiggin puts them there--for good.
If, that is, there is justice in the world; and if no sequel is contemplated...
