It may be wishful thinking on my part but I think that the current crisis and likely slow recovery will afford considerable opportunities for fresh thinking, including a willingness to reject some of those dead ideas targeted by Matt in his book. In effect, the current crisis has been akin to a rescrambling of the eggs that the late Mancur Olson argued was necessary to break the gridlock of interest groups. Wars can have this effect. So can deep recessions. It is at such times that people are most likely to question the status quo and be willing to embrace ideas for moving beyond it. Such times, of course, are potentially dangerous; they can lead to revolution. What Matt is calling for is a continuous, bloodless revolution in ideas. That can happen as parties to the old status quo conventions age and die. Or crises such as the current one can bring change much faster.

Ironically change is less likely if the economy bounces back quickly from this downturn. Should that happen there will be a great temptation to return to business as usual. Why fix what may turn out to have only temporarily unfixable?

I do not think that is a likely outcome, however, for all the obvious reasons: we were overleveraged going into this crisis, consumer and business confidence has fallen sharply, there is a large and growing debt overhand, and so on. The slower the pace of the recovery, the more agitation there will be to shake things up in many areas of our economy and society.

With the exception of the outcome on taxes and entitlements I discussed in my post yesterday, I think Matt's identification of dead ideas in his book is basically correct. Whether the new ideas he offers for the future will prevail is a far more uncertain proposition.