Jeff Madrick, a former economics columnist for Harper’s and The New
York Times, is a regular contributor to The New York Review of
Books and the editor of Challenge magazine. He is visiting
professor of humanities at The Cooper Union and director of the
Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at the
Century Foundation. His books include Age of Greed, The End of
Affluence, and Taking America. He has also written for The
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Institutional Investor, The
Nation, The American Prospect, The Boston Globe, and Newsday. He
lives in New York City.
www.jeffmadrick.com
@JeffMadrick
Top Ten Business Books of 2015, Booklist
“Engaging. . . . An important and eloquent voice.” —The New
York Review of Books
“If there were an eighth bad idea, it would be ignoring this book.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Must-read. . . . Brisk and accessible. . . . Madrick outlines the
wrong-headed propositions, fictitious models, shoddy research, and
partisan agendas that have made a reexamination of the entire field
long overdue.” —Salon
“Jeff Madrick argues that the professional failures since 2008
didn’t come out of the blue but were rooted in decades of
intellectual malfeasance. . . . Madrick has clarified my own
thinking on the subject. . . . [These] bad ideas are definitely out
there, have been expressed by plenty of economists, and have indeed
done a lot of harm. . . . Important.” —Paul Krugman, The New York
Times
“‘Zombie ideas,’ it’s been said, are those that should have been
killed by evidence, but refuse to die. Even more obdurate are the
axioms of orthodox economics, upon which pernicious policies are
erected. Mythbuster Madrick, in clear and compelling prose,
demolishes seven of the biggest of these. May they (hopefully) rest
in peace.” —Mike Wallace, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and
coauthor of Gotham
“Fascinating and provocative. . . . Madrick makes a strong,
persuasively argued case, offering a refreshing take on the
political and fiscal policies that have defined our era, and the
questionable foundations on which they uncomfortably rest.”
—PopMatters.com
“A readable, useful economic text. Somewhere, John Maynard Keynes
is smiling.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Influenced on the one side by broad, somewhat ideological belief
in the efficacy of markets, and on the other side by strong belief
in the value of what can be learned by building and analyzing
simple formal models, in recent years the economics discipline has
lost much of its ability and interest in studying pragmatically and
empirically how the economy actually operates. Madrick’s Seven Bad
Ideas is one of the best discussions of this problem that I have
seen.” —Richard Nelson, professor emeritus, Columbia
University
“In his incisive new book Jeff Madrick shows in rigorous and
compelling detail how mainstream economic theory not only failed to
anticipate the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that
followed, but actively contributed to the worst economic calamity
since the Great Depression. If you suspect there is something
radically wrong with mainstream economic theory, you must read
Seven Bad Ideas.” —John Gray, professor emeritus, London
School of Economics
“In the venerable Mark Twain tradition, Jeff Madrick explains
that what makes some economists so dangerous isn’t what they don’t
know, it’s what they know that just ain’t so.” —Robert H. Frank,
author of The Economic Naturalist
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