Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us, by John Quiggin (Princeton, £16.95)
The financial crisis has disproved many cherished tenets of "market liberalism", such as the "Efficient Markets Hypothesis", yet these zombie ideas still shamble through newspapers and journals. Enter economist Quiggin, calmly wielding dual shotguns to blast them relentlessly in the face. Just as useful as these blood-spattered executions are the almost loving histories of how such ideas (eg, that "a rising tide lifts all boats"; or what glories in the name of "Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium") got started in the first place. (Zombies don't kill people; people who make zombies do.)
As Quiggin explains with elegance, lucidity and deadpan humour, the undead ideas here are interconnected: killing one causes it to knock over another, in a sort of zombie-dominoes effect. Once the Efficient Markets Hypothesis is headshotted, the idea that private companies will always run things better than governments goes down too. (Good luck, Royal Mail.) Quiggin is also quietly angry, eg about the "Great Risk Shift" accomplished by the zombie ideology in its pomp (risk was shifted from society to individuals), or the "widespread acceptance [. . .] that recessions are not really a problem a claim that no one who has experienced the sharp end of a recession would accept for a moment". Quite. It's a bit like an educational version of Resident Evil, with footnotes.
The Management Myth: Debunking Modern Business Philosophy, by Matthew Stewart (Norton, £12.99)
Oh, hello again, Great Risk Shift: "The disempowerment of the lower classes has grown in direct proportion to the growth in the rhetoric of empowerment preached by the gurus." This book interleaves the confessions of a philosophy-graduate-student-suddenly-turned-high-flying-management-consultant with a scathing history of management "theory" (often derived from fraudulent "research"), from Frederick Winslow Taylor onwards. The latter is the real meat; the fragments of memoir by comparison are monochrome and eventually self-pitying, though they do culminate in the balefully satisfying image of a firm of management consultants that can't manage itself.
Stewart shows how business-theory academics, as well as spiritual gurus such as Tom Peters, are "too close to the customer". The prose is blackly amusing in its implacable hostility to the pseudo-ideas it explicates ("a hortatory noise another nonfalsifiable grunt"), giving a particularly persuasive demonstration of the vacuity of "strategy" as a business term. As a furious assault on an entire conceptual ecosystem, indeed, Stewart's approach commends itself as a kind of intellectual strategic bombing.
The Naked Scientist, by Chris Smith (Little, Brown, £12.99)
One of these days I intend to publish my popular guide to uncovering surprising truths about everyday life using only the methods of instant literary criticism, under the mildly sexually suggestive title The Naked Book-Reviewer. Until then I will read books like this one, quite amiable but of dubious purpose. It consists of tiny blog-post-style articles about Amazing Science News (mainly medicine and biology), by the doctor behind a popular website and podcast.
Unfortunately, this dead-tree version has no references to the original research papers or press releases about scientists who "have used a virus to help them make a better battery!" or who "have come up with a chemical that makes you think that manure smells nice!" or who "have stumbled upon a possible treatment for [. . .] Crohn's disease a dose of worms!" It seems being a Naked Scientist involves making science sound exciting by adding an exclamation mark to it. As the Naked Book-Reviewer, I will follow this example!
