Quiggin - Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us

The idea for this book began when I read this striking passage in Animal Spirits by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller:

The economics of the textbooks seeks to minimize as much as possible departures from pure economic motivation and from rationality. There is a good reason for doing soand each of us has spent a good portion of his life writing in this tradition. The economics of Adam Smith is well understood. Explanations in terms of small deviations from Smiths ideal system are thus clear, because they are posed within a framework that is already very well understood. But that does not mean that these small deviations from Smiths system describe how the economy actually works. Our book marks a break with this tradition. In our view, economic theory should be derived not from the minimal deviations from the system of Adam Smith but rather from the deviations that actually do occur and can be observed. (Akerlof and Shiller 2009, 45)

This passage motivated me to write about its implications for macroeconomics in the Crooked Timber blog. In comments, economist Max Sawicky, posting under the pseudonym MiracleMax, suggested that this, combined with some earlier posts on ideas refuted by the financial crisis, would make a good book. Brad DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley picked up the idea, and the next day Seth Ditchik of Princeton University Press emailed me to say he thought it was a great idea. The result is before you.

More than most books, this one has been improved by comments from others, not all of whom I can name. As I wrote draft chapters, I posted them on crookedtimber.org, and on my personal blog johnquiggin.com, then combined them in a draft on wikidot.com. I asked for comments and received, in total, several thousand, from well over a hundred different commenters, most of them pseudonymous.

I cant thank all those who commented, but I would like to mention Alice, Bert, Bianca Steele, Martin Bento, Kevin Donoghue, Kenny Easwaran, John Emerson, Freelander, Jim Harrison, JoB, P. M. Lawrence, Terje Petersen, Donald Oats, Andrew Reynolds, smiths, John Street, Uncle Milton, Robert Waldmann, Tim Worstall, and Zamfir.

I also received helpful comments from friends and colleagues, including George Akerlof, Chris Barrett, Mark Blyth, Brad DeLong, Joshua Gans, Paul Krugman, Andrew McLennan, Flavio Menezes, and Eric Rauchway. Several anonymous reviewers for Princeton University Press went above and beyond the call of duty in providing extensive and valuable comments. My wife and colleague, Nancy Wallace, read the entire text and made many helpful editorial and substantive suggestions.

Thanks also to the editorial and production team at Princeton University Press. Seth Ditchik was a marvelous and supportive editor, ably assisted by Janie Chan. Debbie Tegarden, my production editor, was unfailingly cheerful and supportive, not to mention highly efficient in turning a manuscript into a book on a very tight time frame. Other production staff including Jack Rummel and Jim Curtis gave able support. The marvelous cover design by Karl Spurzem and Dimitri Karetnikov, drawing on an idea from Seth Ditchik, speaks for itself (it says, Brraaaiiinnnssss).