Author Talk: Jeff Madrick on "Seven Bad Ideas"

Thursday, December 4, 2014, 6:30 - 8pm

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Jeff Madrick, author of the new book Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World (Knopf) and adjunct professor of economics in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences will discuss his new book in a free, public lecture. In the book Madrick takes seven widely accepted principles of economics and outlines precisely how each fails the test of real world markets.

The housing market has mostly rebounded, the stock market shoots ever higher, corporate profits have never been better, but something still isn’t right. Unemployment is better but at the severe cost of wage stagnation, longer hours, and perpetual job insecurity across many sectors. The housing market, fueled by cash investors, is working its way back to pre-crash levels but all of a sudden, in 2014, has significantly backed down in many markets as prices inflate too much for the savvy investor and average home buyers still remain unable to acquire home loans. Europe remains firmly entrenched in recession as austerity economics continues its reign.

What exactly is going on here? And why have the people long hailed as experts of governing such matters proven themselves so very bad at predicting, correcting, or implementing anything that purposefully guides the economy? The current state of global and local economies is far from healthy, despite what Wall Street is trying to sell us. Jeff Madrick tells us exactly why in Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World.

Jeff Madrick is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, and a former economics columnist for The New York Times and editor of Challenge magazine. He is director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Rediscovering Government Initiative at the Century Foundation, where he is a Senior Fellow. His previous books include The Age of Greed and The End of Affluence.

Located in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, at 41 Cooper Square (on Third Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets)

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