Dead Ideas

By Lila Shapiro - March 23, 2009, 2:19PM

This week at Cafe we have Matt Miller with us, book clubbing on The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity. In it he dissects a series of conventional ideas - on education, free trade, health coverage, taxes - that are out of date and threaten our nation. From Matt's opening post (to go up shortly):

The book is about how we get trapped in old ways of thinking that end up really hurting us -- about the threat now posed to our economy by the things we think we know. Look at the last 18 months and you'll see how this explains much of what's happened. The failure to explode a Dead Idea -- that Financial Markets Can Regulate Themselves -- got us into today's economic ditch (as even Alan Greenspan, the chief apostle of that perverse notion, now admits).

Matt Miller is co-host of public radio's Left, Right & Center, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and author of The Two Percent Solution.

Joining him are Robert Litan, expert on antitrust, banking, and internet policy at the Brookings Institution and Kauffman Foundation; Justin Fox, business and economics columnist for TIME Magazine; Jeff Madrick, editor of Challenge Magazine; Philip Howard, author of The Death of Common Sense and founder of Common Good; Michael Shellenberger, president of the Breakthrough Institute.