Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future Illustrated Edition

Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner and columnist at The New York Times, organized the essays in ARGUING WITH ZOMBIES into 18 chapters. The titles and lead essays for these chapters include: FISCAL PHONIES, The Gullibility of the Deficit Scolds; TAX CUTS, The Ultimate Zombie; TRADE WARS, Globaloney and the Backlash; INEQUALITY, The Skewing of America; and CLIMATE, Most Important Thing. People who are regular readers of the Times will have seen most of the essays in these chapters although Krugman, by organizing his essays thematically, endows them with added persuasiveness and power.These, and all other subjects in ZOMBIES, are important and topical. Even so, the section in ZOMBIES that resonated the most with me was: TRUMP, Why Not the Worst? To show you why, I will name an essay in this section and then provide some edited snippets. With apologies to Paul:o Why It Can Happen Here, 8/27/18: “What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe. This includes Poland and Hungary, still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead… There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms… would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. Just look what’s been happening at the state level. In North Carolina… In Georgia… In West Virginia… There are surely scores… of similar stories across the nation. What all of them reflect is the reality that the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to entrench its power.”o Truth and Virtue in the Age of Trump, 11/12/18. “…Trump and his allies don’t accept the very notion of objective facts. ‘Fake news’ doesn’t mean actual false reporting; it means any report that hurts Trump, no matter how solidly verified. And conversely, any assertion that helps Trump, whether it’s about job creation or votes, is true precisely because it helps him… They don’t ‘really believe’ anything, except that they should get what they want. Any vote count that might favor a Democrat is bad for them; therefore it’s fraudulent, no evidence needed… This explains Republicans’ addiction to conspiracy theories. After all, if people keep insisting on the truth of something that hurts their party, it can’t be out of respect for the facts…So people making inconvenient assertions must be in the pay of sinister forces… George Soros…”o Conservatism’s Monstrous Endgame, 12/17/18. “But the parties are structurally different. The Democratic Party is a loose coalition of interest groups, but the modern Republican Party is dominated my ‘movement conservatism,’ a monolithic structure held together by big money—often deployed stealthily—and the closed intellectual ecosystem of Fox News and other partisan media. And people who rise within this movement are, to a far greater degree than those of the other side, apparatchiks, political loyalists who can be counted on not to stray from the party line… Republicans have been stuffing the courts with such people for decades…”o Who’s Afraid of Nancy Pelosi? 8/13/18. “…whenever you hear Republicans claim that Pelosi is some kind of wild-eyed leftist, ask yourself, what’s so radical about protecting retirement income, expanding health care, and reining in runaway bankers? ... So how does Pelosi stack up against the four Republicans who have held the speaker’s position since the G.O.P. took control of the House in 1994? Newt Gingrich was a blowhard who shut down the government in a failed attempt to blackmail Bill Clinton into cutting Medicare, then led the impeachment of Clinton over an affair even as he himself was cheating on his wife. Dennis Hastert… personal behavior aside... implemented “the ‘Hastert Rule,’ under which Republicans could only support legislation approved by a majority of their own party, empowered extremists and made America less governable… John Boehner didn’t do much except oppose everything Obama proposed… Paul Ryan is a flimflam man…”Hard-hitting, timely and highly recommended.

I'm not well educated in economics, but I think this book is a great choice whether you're new to the subject or already well informed. From what I have read, econ doesn't strike me as a subject that should qualify for Nobel Prizes: seems to me that nobody really knows what's going on. But the author has won one, and, reading it, you'll understand why: vast knowledge and experience and the ability to wield both theory and actual data from practice. The book comprises a collection of his New York Times columns with some new commentary. That may give a reader a sense of disappointment if you're hoping for a brand new analysis with all the past's errors corrected and the theories improved on. But I enjoyed following his thoughts historically, watching him weed through and rethink ideas and events. In case you're wondering--spoiler--the zombies are the people who claim to know about economies, who cling to ideas practitioners have proven wrong, and who tell others what to think without really looking at data and experience. Apparently we have many of them about, and they are indeed causing great harm. They should remember their Sherlock Holmes: it's a cardinal mistake to reason without data. Highly recommended.

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.

See above!! But beautifully written>

O livro é ótimo e é de grande atualidade

Easy to read and easy to comprehend unless you're a Republican. Then there'a cognitive dissonance in play

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?

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.”