Time to bury the zombie economics that led us into the crisis and produce more realistic, socially useful ideas

The effects of the global financial crisis make the headlines everyday in the UK and most of the developed world. Yet at the core of the financial and intellectual institutions that created the crisis, the meltdown of 2008 is already a distant memory. Professor John Quiggin examines the ‘zombie’ economic ideas that led us into the crisis and argues that we need to abandon theories based on absolute individual rationality and better understand the ‘animal spirits’ that can lead to boom and bust