Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World

Madrick (Age of Greed) takes aim, in dense but readable prose, at mainstream economic thinking: the ideas that are so commonly accepted that they’re now taken as gospel. Focusing on the 2008 recession, he presents a thorough exegesis of this accepted wisdom and its effect on the economy, starting with Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” theory, which describes how buyers and sellers decide a good or service’s ideal price. Madrick goes on to examine Say’s Law and austerity economics, John Maynard Keynes’s theories on interest rates, and Milton Friedman’s theories of free markets. He also addresses the question: where did we go awry? Mainly, he says, when we started treating economics as a perfect science, thereby giving “economic ideas more credibility than they often deserve.” Moreover, modern thought has led us to believe that the government is almost always bad and the markets almost always good. Those bankers and economists who failed to avert the crisis aren’t evil, according to Madrick, just misguided, particularly in oversimplifying major economic shifts. This book is an attempt to inject the complexity back in. As a result, it’s a tough read for the nonacademic reader, but one well worth the effort. (Oct.)