The Politics Of Bad Ideas

Author : Bryan Jones
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317343034
Total Pages : 179 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Politics of Bad Ideas written by Bryan Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-08-29 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Jeff Madrick
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307950727
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seven Bad Ideas written by Jeff Madrick and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Mark Lawrence Schrad
Publisher : OUP USA
ISBN 13 : 0195391233
Total Pages : 315 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Political Power of Bad Ideas written by Mark Lawrence Schrad and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2010-03-24 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Heather Mac Donald
Publisher : Ivan R. Dee Publisher
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Burden of Bad Ideas written by Heather Mac Donald and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2000 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Fred Block
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674050711
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Power of Market Fundamentalism written by Fred Block and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-30 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Mark Blyth
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199389446
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Austerity written by Mark Blyth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Arthur C. Brooks
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062883771
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Love Your Enemies written by Arthur C. Brooks and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Richard Hofstadter
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307388441
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Paranoid Style in American Politics written by Richard Hofstadter and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-06-10 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Frits Bolkestein
Publisher : Author House
ISBN 13 : 1481709003
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Intellectual Temptation written by Frits Bolkestein and published by Author House. This book was released on 2013-03-29 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Michael Smith
Publisher : Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN 13 : 1402293925
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book 100 of the Worst Ideas in History written by Michael Smith and published by Sourcebooks, Inc.. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A humorous illustrated gift book with history's biggest fails hailing from politics, pop culture, international relations, business, sports, and more. From skinny-dipping Presidents to toxic tooth fillings to singing pop stars who can't carry a tune, 100 of the Worst Ideas in History is a celebration of humanity's historical—and often hysterical—missteps that have started wars, sunk countries, wrecked companies, scuttled careers, lost millions of dollars, and even endangered the Earth. Interesting stories from history include: How a confused chauffeur helped start World War I Who turned down the greatest product placement opportunity in Hollywood history How a Chicago White Sox game helped hasten the demise of disco The toad that nearly ate Australia The most dangerous children's game ever invented Spanning politics, pop culture, fashion, sports, technology, and more, this irreverent and witty book is packed with fun photos and sidebars, tracing how these thundering brainstorms turned into blundering brain farts—and the astonishing impacts our faux pas and foibles still have on us today. Great for gifting! Funny Father's Day gift White elephant gag gift Unique gift for the history major Fun teacher gift