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    Unavailable
    The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity
    Unavailable
    The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity
    Unavailable
    The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity
    Ebook330 pages3 hours

    The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity

    By Matt Miller

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    "Offers the most plausible way to renovate our political and policy thinking to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century."—Joe Klein, Time

    A leading political and business thinker identifies the greatest threat to our economic future: the things we think we know-but don't.

    America is at a crossroads. In the face of global competition and rapid technological change, our economy is about to face its most severe test in nearly a century-one that will make the recent turmoil in the financial system look like a modest setback by comparison. Yet our leaders have failed to prepare us for what lies ahead because they are in the grip of a set of "dead ideas" about how a modern economy should work. They wrongly believe that

    - Our kids will earn more than we do
    - Free trade is always good, no matter who gets hurt
    - Employers should be responsible for health coverage
    - Taxes hurt the economy
    - Schools are a local matter
    - Money follows merit

    These ways of thinking-dubious at best and often dead wrong-are on a collision course with economic developments that are irre-versible.

    In The Tyranny of Dead Ideas, Matt Miller offers a unique blend of insights from history, psychology, and economics to illuminate where today's destructive conventional wisdom came from and how it holds our country back. He also introduces us to a new way of thinking-what he calls "tomorrow's destined ideas"-that can reinvigorate our economy, our politics, and our day-to-day lives. These destined ideas may seem counterintuitive now, but they will coalesce in the coming years in ways that will transform America.

    A strikingly original assessment of our current dilemma and an indispensable guide to our future, Miller's provocative and path-breaking book reveals why it is urgent that we break the tyranny of dead ideas, for it is only by doing so that we can move beyond the limits of today's obsolete debates and reinvent American capitalism and democracy for the twenty-first century.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJan 19, 2010
    ISBN9781429988865
    Unavailable
    The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity
    Author

    Matt Miller

    Matt Miller is the author of The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller. He is a contributing editor at Fortune; a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; the host of public radio’s popular week-in-review program Left, Right & Center; and a consultant to corporations, governments, and nonprofits. He lives in Los Angeles.

    Read more from Matt Miller

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    Reviews for The Tyranny of Dead Ideas

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    • 2/5
      Interesting, and very well written.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this book very much and would recommend it to anyone willing to think "outside the box" about public policy. I especially appreciated the historical evolution of these dead ideas. My feeling is that not many people are aware of their evolution. I would like to see ore elected officials read this book. I read it because it was being read and recommended by the mayor of Minneapolis, R.T. Rybak. It is definitely a discussion starter.
    • 4/5
      I loved this book and am hopeful that many will read it. There are so many huge issues facing our government and society, and our perspective on them is vividly colored by past experiences and situations. Reality is that so much of our society and economy has changed that we need to test the veracity of many of the ideas that guide public policy today.
    • 5/5
      A quick and very engaging read that (to my mind at least) brings some thought provoking context to the current state of political discourse in the America.
    • 5/5
      I saw Matt Miller on a Big Think video a few weeks back and was immediately taken with his theories on "dead ideas". It's not a complex concept and it is what you think it is -- ideas whose shelf-life has expired. And yet, people tend to cling to these ideas despite the fact that this act leads to some pretty nasty consequences. Miller tackles lots of these ideas in the political realm and discusses such things as health care, free-trade, education, taxes, and the like. The book takes an informative, if also somewhat cursory, look at the history of each of the "dead ideas" and proposes a whole new set of ideas we ought to adopt. On the whole, the book is fairly standard stuff and amounts to a litany of liberal-leaning solutions to today's problems (not that that's a problem for me). Where the book shines out is the call for "court-jesters" who take a withering look at assumptions in a given organization. We so often look at these critics as trouble -- not as team players. But Miller rightly points out how necessary these types are. These people are not your toxically inclined colleagues who carp all day, but are instead people who make hard, but constructive critiques of the organization.As we move into a new political era, all of the old assumptions that us into the current crisis are coming under the microscope. The Tyranny of Dead Ideas' prescriptions may not be for every person, but the method of radical critique seems to be more relevant than it has in my lifetime. It's easy to say that Miller's methods are necessary, but few people or organizations actually turn the ideas into reality. Now that we live in "interesting times", I don't know that we have any option but to proceed critically.