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Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk among Us investigates several economic assumptions that the Global Financial Crisis should have exposed as wrong ideas to the world's economists.

The book is conceived as a way to make several important economic ideas accessible to the general non-specialised public by representing these ideas as the economic version of the walking dead of popular culture: the zombie. The concept is great, and the book's lurid horror comic-book cover introduces the idea very well.

Unfortunately, of all the professional streams that attempt to explain their specialty to the general public economists seem to be the least successful. The author, John Quiggin, is a professor of economics at the University of Queensland in Australia. While it's great to see such a high profile academic challenge the dangerous traditions of economics, Quiggin has failed to correctly judge the boundary between the academic world and the educated general public, so the book is full of technical terms that are not explained and makes assumptions that the audience will understand many economic concepts and constructs. If you are not an economist you will need to be sitting at your computer as you read so that you can Google these terms and concepts.

I got enough of the content of this book to believe it is full of important information, but it's not accessible without a lot of work. Perhaps a revised edition will resolve this; even a glossary would be a great help.

Quiggan has also missed what should be the greatest economic zombie of all (except it can't yet be a zombie because it hasn't yet died to be resurrected): the assumption that economic growth can go on forever on a finite Earth.

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