The Economic Crisis: Notes from the Underground - Paperback

by Thomas I. Palley (Author)

This book provides a collection of short essays detailing the causes of the economic crisis and the failure of the economics profession to foresee and explain it. An old adage is "The winners get to write history" and that is proving true in the current moment. Open any major newspaper and the op-ed page contains articles by the same economists and policymakers as before the financial crash of 2008. One myth the winners are looking to promulgate is the crisis was not predicted and not predictable. This claim has a purpose as it excuses the economics profession from its catastrophic intellectual failure. The book challenges this "winners' version of history" by showing the crisis was predictable and foreseen. The articles provide easy access to both theoretical and policy controversies that continue to be important, and they also show little has been done to fix the root problems. The academy is a club and it resists change because club members benefit from their intellectual monopoly. This monopoly means politicians are all fed roughly the same policy diet. Politicians are also subject to the pull of money and money likes the existing mainstream economic paradigm. Together, this constitutes a powerful sociological system that is hard to crack. Part of cracking it is exposing the failure of economists by showing the crisis was foretold and predicted.

Author Biography

Thomas I. Palley is an economist living in Washington D.C. He is currently an associate of the Economic Growth Program of the New America Foundation in Washington D.C. He was formerly chief economist with the U.S. - China Economic and Security Review Commission. Prior to joining the Commission he served as director of the Open Society Institute's Globalization Reform Project and as assistant director of Public Policy at the AFL-CIO. Dr. Palley holds a B.A. degree from Oxford University and a M.A. degree in International Relations and Ph.D. in Economics, both from Yale University. Thomas Palley is the author of: Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream and the Case for Structural Keynesianism (1998). Post Keynesian Economics: Debt, Distribution and the Macro Economy (1996). From Financial Crisis to Stagnation: The Destruction of Shared Prosperity and the Role of Economics (2012). He has published in numerous academic journals, and written for The Atlantic Monthly, American Prospect and Nation magazines. His numerous op-eds are posted on his website.