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,