John Quiggin

Only read this book if you are prepared to be grumpy. I've been wondering for the past 2-3 years why politicians have been arguing back and forth about the bailout, healthcare, the budget, etc. without really having any intelligent or substantial feedback from economists. I figured they were just ignoring the economists because they were dumb politicians. Actually, the truth is that there are hardly any macroeconomists who have had anything useful to say about the recession.

Quiggin does a very good job of explaining how macroeconomics went so wrong over the past forty years and demonstrating that mainstream ideas about market efficiency have very little relationship to reality. Despite lots of technical details, the book is fairly accessible to those of us who know embarrassingly little about economics and is a short, engaging read.

I am not enough of an expert on economics or politics to be able to properly argue against any dumb conservative objections to Quiggin's argument, but honestly all of the rebuttals I could imagine would have to start with the assumption that our current economic crisis, and the gross inequality that preceded it, is somehow better than the alternative. Yeah, sorry, I'm not buying it.… (meer)

The author had a great idea for this book but it doesn't quite live up to my expectations. It is a good, simplified, history of the ups and downs (and returns to life) of various flavours of economics over the last century but doesn't do a good job of addressed the structural and cultural forces that play such a strong role in the curious revivification of ideas that by all logic should have long since withered. Indeed, it is a strangely apolitical book given the way in which economics and politics are two sides of the same coin.… (meer)