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What Hacker News says
- There are several books with the word “Zombie” on the title that can specifically teach you exactly about that!
Some of them actually authored by Economics Nobel Prize winners ;)
Here:
"Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future" by Paul Krugman (2020)
"Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us" by John Quiggin (2010)
Bonus:
"Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely - 2008
"The Myth of the Rational Market" by Justin Fox - 2009
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - 2007
- Unfortunately.
May I recommend a book by an Economics Nobel Prize winner?
Here:
"Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future" by Paul Krugman (2020)
And maybe even better:
"Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea" by Mark Blyth - 2013
- Demonstrably false. Ten years ago a bunch of folks predicted a bunch of bad things would happen because of money printing and QE:
> We believe the Federal Reserve's large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called "quantitative easing") should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment.
* https://economics21.org/html/open-letter-ben-bernanke-287.ht...
A bunch of other folks (generally Keynesians, like Paul Krugman), said the above was non-sense.
The results of the 'experiment' came in: the Keynesians were right. See also "expansionary austerity".
In fact Krugman recently wrote an entire book on "zombie ideas": certain things that come up over and over again, often over several decades, but will not die; Arguing with Zombies:
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...
* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/review-...
There are correct answers. It's just that certain political classes find them 'inconvenient' (i.e., contradictory) to their ideologies.
There are of course complicated matters where things are open for debate. But some things have been settled.
- > Perhaps I'm having a Mandela Effect moment, but hasn't "trickle down" been debunked before this study...repeatedly?
The idea has been around in some form or another for a long time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#History...
The most recent reincarnation was known to be not very good economics from the get-go:
> What I want to talk about is when, exactly, the GOP went over the edge. Obviously it didn’t happen all at once. But I think the real watershed came in 1980-81, when supply-side economics became the party’s official doctrine.
> I’m not sure, even now, whether people who aren’t involved in economic policy discussion understand that supply-side wasn’t a doctrine like monetarism or even real business cycles — ideas I may think are wrong, but which had and to some extent still have significant support from professionals in the field. Supply-side economics never had any evidence behind it; it never had any support in academic research; it barely even had any support among economic researchers and forecasters in the business world. It was and remains crank economics pure and simple, with nothing going for it except political convenience.
> Yet 35 years ago the GOP was already willing to embrace this doctrine because it was politically convenient, and could be used to justify tax cuts for the rich, which have always been the priority.
> And given this, why should anyone be surprised at all the reality denial and trashing of any kind of evidence that followed? You say economics is a pseudo-science? Fine. First they came for the economists; then they came for the climate scientists and the evolutionary biologists.
* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/07/18/the-gops-origin...
He has an entire section on this in this recent book Arguing with Zombies, along with how the GOP are worried about deficits and debts when they're out of office, but then don't once they're in power (e.g., tax cuts in the December 2017 budget):
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
* https://www.worldcat.org/title/arguing-with-zombies-economic...
- > Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID.
Is it a coïncidence that all occurred under a GOP/Republican administration?
Clinton treated the 1993 as a crime instead of an act of war, and prosecuted those that were responsible:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
Meanwhile Bush (really Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz) went galavanting into other countries.
Obama was hamstrung by a GOP Congress with (so-called, supposed) deficit hawks that were screaming about deficits, debt, and austerity… which they promptly abandoned they were in power to pass the giant December 2017 tax cut bill:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017
Of course now that Biden looks likely to win they're reverting to form:
> The short version: A Senate GOP strategist privately confided to Bloomberg that a key Republican goal right now is to lay the groundwork to revert hard to austerity, should Biden prevail, crippling the possibility of any serious stimulus efforts next year, even amid continued economic misery.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/14/how-repub...
Paul Krugman has an entire section on this in his latest book Arguing With Zombies.
