The Politics of Bad Ideas

The Politics of Bad Ideas PDF Author: Bryan Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317343034
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Get Book

Book Description
This highly anticipated addition to the "Great Questions in Politics" series offers a provocative argument about the persistence of bad ideas in shaping American economic policy. The result of a collaboration between political scientist Bryan D. Jones and economist Walter Williams, The Politics of Bad Ideas is indispensable reading for any study of American government, public policy, or economic and budgetary analysis. The Politics of Bad Ideas examines why, over the last quarter century, bad economic ideas -- such as cutting taxes without cutting spending -- have become so influential in shaping government policies. Using in-depth research and trenchant political and economic analysis, the book explores why those bad ideas continue to survive despite overwhelming evidence that they in fact cause damage to the federal government's long-term fiscal stability and the American economy.

The Politics of Bad Ideas

The Politics of Bad Ideas PDF Author: Bryan Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317343034
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Get Book

Book Description
This highly anticipated addition to the "Great Questions in Politics" series offers a provocative argument about the persistence of bad ideas in shaping American economic policy. The result of a collaboration between political scientist Bryan D. Jones and economist Walter Williams, The Politics of Bad Ideas is indispensable reading for any study of American government, public policy, or economic and budgetary analysis. The Politics of Bad Ideas examines why, over the last quarter century, bad economic ideas -- such as cutting taxes without cutting spending -- have become so influential in shaping government policies. Using in-depth research and trenchant political and economic analysis, the book explores why those bad ideas continue to survive despite overwhelming evidence that they in fact cause damage to the federal government's long-term fiscal stability and the American economy.

Seven Bad Ideas

Seven Bad Ideas PDF Author: Jeff Madrick
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307950727
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book

Book Description
From the former economics columnist for Harper’s and The New York Times, a bold indictment of some of our most accepted mainstream economic theories—why they’re wrong, and how they’ve been harming America and the world. Ideas have the power to change history. But what happens when they are bad? In a tour de force of economics, history, and analysis, Jeff Madrick shows how theories on austerity, inflation, and efficient markets have become unassailable mantras over recent years, to the detriment of the country as a whole. Working backwards from the Great Recession, Madrick pulls no punches as he reconsiders seven of the greatest false idols of modern economic theory, from Say’s Law to Milton Friedman, illustrating how these ideas have been damaging markets, infrastructure, and individual livelihoods for years. Trenchant, sweeping, and empirical, Seven Bad Ideas resoundingly disrupts the status quo of modern economic theory.

The Political Power of Bad Ideas

The Political Power of Bad Ideas PDF Author: Mark Lawrence Schrad
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195391233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Get Book

Book Description
In this work, Mark Lawrence Schrad looks on an oddity of modern history - the broad diffusion of temperance legislation in the early 20th century - to make a broad argument about how bad policy ideas achieve international success.

The Burden of Bad Ideas

The Burden of Bad Ideas PDF Author: Heather Mac Donald
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Get Book

Book Description
The prevailing orthodoxy of ideas, she finds, has affected our law schools, our schools of education, our museums, even our schools of public health - with ruinous consequences for the teaching of our children."--BOOK JACKET.

The Power of Market Fundamentalism

The Power of Market Fundamentalism PDF Author: Fred Block
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674050711
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book

Book Description
What is it about free-market ideas that give them tenacious staying power in the face of such manifest failures as persistent unemployment, widening inequality, and the severe financial crises that have stressed Western economies over the past forty years? Fred Block and Margaret Somers extend the work of the great political economist Karl Polanyi to explain why these ideas have revived from disrepute in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, to become the dominant economic ideology of our time. Polanyi contends that the free market championed by market liberals never actually existed. While markets are essential to enable individual choice, they cannot be self-regulating because they require ongoing state action. Furthermore, they cannot by themselves provide such necessities of social existence as education, health care, social and personal security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods are subjected to market principles, social life is threatened and major crises ensue. Despite these theoretical flaws, market principles are powerfully seductive because they promise to diminish the role of politics in civic and social life. Because politics entails coercion and unsatisfying compromises among groups with deep conflicts, the wish to narrow its scope is understandable. But like Marx's theory that communism will lead to a "withering away of the State," the ideology that free markets can replace government is just as utopian and dangerous.

Austerity

Austerity PDF Author: Mark Blyth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199389446
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book

Book Description
Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

Love Your Enemies

Love Your Enemies PDF Author: Arthur C. Brooks
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062883771
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER To get ahead today, you have to be a jerk, right? Divisive politicians. Screaming heads on television. Angry campus activists. Twitter trolls. Today in America, there is an “outrage industrial complex” that prospers by setting American against American, creating a “culture of contempt”—the habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect, but as worthless and defective. Maybe, like more than nine out of ten Americans, you dislike it. But hey, either you play along, or you’ll be left behind, right? Wrong. In Love Your Enemies, social scientist and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength Arthur C. Brooks shows that abuse and outrage are not the right formula for lasting success. Brooks blends cutting-edge behavioral research, ancient wisdom, and a decade of experience leading one of America’s top policy think tanks in a work that offers a better way to lead based on bridging divides and mending relationships. Brooks’ prescriptions are unconventional. To bring America together, we shouldn’t try to agree more. There is no need for mushy moderation, because disagreement is the secret to excellence. Civility and tolerance shouldn’t be our goals, because they are hopelessly low standards. And our feelings toward our foes are irrelevant; what matters is how we choose to act. Love Your Enemies offers a clear strategy for victory for a new generation of leaders. It is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another, despite our differences.

The Intellectual Temptation

The Intellectual Temptation PDF Author: Frits Bolkestein
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1481709003
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
an absorbing (and beautifully written) study that deserves a very wide audience. - Joshua Muravchik an erudite account of where [the] vision [of individual liberty] comes from, why some ideologues set themselves against it, and how our contemporaries have ceased to treasure it. - Christopher Caldwell Bolkestein exposes todays fashionable, yet dangerous ideas, doing a great service not only to Europe but indeed to the whole of Western civilization. - Ayaan Hirsi Ali The dangers of intellectuals and their ideas in politics have rarely beenwritten about by politicians themselves. This is not surprising, for few politicians are up to the task. However, Frits Bolkestein is a notable exception, bringing rare if not unique qualifi cations to this examination. Not only has he held national and international offi ce in Europe, but he has also studied, read, taught and published broadly. The thesis of The Intellectual Temptation is simple but penetrating: intellectuals ideas are problematic as political ideas because they are often neither derived from nor falsifiable by experience. These ideas are frequently dreams attempting to become reality through power politics. There is also a cultural problem. Intellectuals are pack animals, looking to one another for approval. This affects the quality of their ideas, as they are susceptible to fashionable ideology and group pressurefrequently attracted to ideas that are appealing rather than sound. Very few of them are brave enough to stand against the prevailing orthodoxy. Beginning with a history of ideology, Bolkestein traces a nearly 300 year trend of bad ideas making worse politics, sometimes disastrously so. From his own experience he offers a vision of a politics of prudence, proper pragmatism and Classicism as a way out of the intellectual temptation that we have fallen under.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

The Paranoid Style in American Politics PDF Author: Richard Hofstadter
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307388441
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book

Book Description
This timely reissue of Richard Hofstadter's classic work on the fringe groups that influence American electoral politics offers an invaluable perspective on contemporary domestic affairs.In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?, ” The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States.

What Were They Thinking?

What Were They Thinking? PDF Author: Bruce Felton
Publisher: Globe Pequot
ISBN: 9781599211329
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Now revised and expanded, this best-selling compendium of some 400 harebrained schemes, fool notions, and misguided obsessions both grandiose and mundane covers bad ideas in politics, science, sports, and more.