Paul Krugman reviews a book that places a lot of our economic problems on the economics profession. It does so by criticizing seven ideas that are central to mainstream economics. Krugman does claim that any of these ideas are good ideas. He argues that they are held by a fringe group within the profession. They were used as part of a decades long attack on Keynesian ideas, which has been somewhat successful, and politicians have used them to reduce the influence of government in the economy, but the majority of economists supported the use of federal spending to stimulate the economy.
Krugman realizes that many of the economists who are associated with the seven bad ideas have won Nobel prizes in economics. He may be going a bit too far in claiming that those ideas are held only by outliers in the profession.
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