Dawn of the dead economy

Thirty years of failed economic policies and a widened income and wealth gap between a prosperous few and everybody else begat the current Great Financial Crisis/Recession. Yet those policies live on. John Quiggin concisely covers the story in Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. He outlines the cycles from birth to death to reanimation of these walking-dead policies. Consider the efficient markets hypothesis, in which financial markets value investments accurately. Three financial bubbles in the last decade, each larger then the last, should have buried this policy for good, yet it lives. Then there’s trickle-down economics—the “voodoo” is strong in this one. Failed California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman called to cut the capital-gains taxes for rich folks, claiming that if supplied with more income, they’d create new industries. But weak buyer demand is the problem. Put a bullet through the decaying brain of walking-dead economics by reading Quiggin.