Undead ideas

Anyone who regularly reads Mr Krugman's twice-weekly NYT column, will be familiar with his accessible style, his arguments and his political leanings

At the very least, Arguing with Zombies cannot be criticised for a dull title. The zombies to which Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman’s latest offering refers are “ideas that should have been killed by contrary evidence, but instead keep shambling along, eating people’s brains”. 

Mr Krugman spends nearly 500 pages picking up one idea after another, examining them with a fine toothcomb before demolishing them — or at attempting to do so. He deals here with a wide range of contested ideas roiling chiefly the western intellectual discourse — the privatisation of social security, resistance to health care reform, free market orthodoxy, climate change denial, anti-labour policies and so on. 

The book is a compilation of columns Mr Krugman has written in several publications, mostly the New York Times,  over the years. Anyone who regularly reads Mr Krugman’s twice-weekly NYT  column — which would include many readers of this paper — will be familiar with his accessible style, his arguments and his political leanings.

The ideas under scrutiny — more honestly, under attack — are conservative ones. Mr Krugman has long been a stringent critic of the Republicans and he wears his Democrat-leaning partisanship as a badge of honour. This may make some readers cringe, but his bias does not appear to detract from the insights the book has to offer. 

Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

Author: Paul Krugman

Publisher:  W W Norton

Price: Rs 1,304

Particularly lucid are his columns on Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which made medical insurance mandatory and which most Republicans of Tea Party persuasion have vehemently opposed. Many readers will be familiar with his explanation of the “three-legged stool” structure of the policy — in which, essentially, an expanding medical insurance market (because everyone must be insured) would pay for the poor and the elderly. The policy collapses if any one leg of this stool is sawed off. This, he explains, was done to prevent any subsequent dilution of the Act and is the reason the Trump administration has failed to repeal it despite many promises that it would, though much has been done to weaken it.

But Mr Krugman’s analyses are never restricted to the economics of an issue. He examines the politics and the public perception driving policy. He doesn’t just tell you about a policy or hold people accountable for it, he explains the intent behind policy. “Politicians have walked when money talked,” he writes. Just as the large-scale donations by the fossil fuel industry has made the Republican Party a climate change denier, so the contributions of the insurance industry sustains its opposition to the Affordable Care Act. 

Mr Krugman’s writing isn’t just simply-worded and politically-charged, it is also very quotable. Calling out his fellow economists, he says, “The economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive- looking mathematics, for truth” (on economists’ inability to predict the sub-prime crisis). Or consider this line: “When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: Virtue becomes vice, caution is risky, and prudence is folly” (on how governments — FDRs in particular — dealt with economic depressions).  

The most impressive sections of this book, however, are when Krugman challenges “conventional” ideas, which, as he puts it “everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true.” These include arguments such as “skills gap” (unemployment is high because people don’t have the required skills), markets are a perfectly efficient system, and that robots will take away jobs.

If the book suffers from a flaw it is the arrangement of the columns. They zag between the Bush era in the 2000s to Donald Trump in a matter of pages and then zap you back to the Reagan presidency in the 1980s, which can be disorienting. 

The sheer breadth of topics doesn’t help, either. It is true, of course, that we are dealing with a wide range of zombie ideas in the third decade of the 21st century but cramming them all in one book can make it overwhelming. The result is that Arguing with Zombies could read like a complex and messy web of articles that might put off some readers.

Another issue, perhaps an obvious one, is that the columns that deal entirely with politics are significantly weaker than those that discuss economic issues. Without the statistical analysis to go along, the political commentary feels less insightful. The punches Mr Krugman is pulling in these sections don’t carry the same heft and are easily the most passable bits in the book.