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Book Summary and Reviews of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas by Matt Miller

The Tyranny of Dead Ideas by Matt Miller

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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  • Published:
  • Jan 2009, 272 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

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.

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

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.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Rather than a petulant indictment of our political and economic myopia, this book offers a fair-handed critique." - Publishers Weekly.

"The problem here is the assumption that all Americans hold these old ideas, let alone agree that they are dead; readers who don't follow the author's line of thinking will feel disconnected from the text." - Library Journal.

"Matt Miller writes and thinks with amazing clarity about some of the most difficult problems this country is facing. The Tyranny of Dead Ideas offers the most plausible way to renovate our political and policy thinking to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century -- if we have the guts to go forward. This is must reading for the next president and for anyone who wants to be a creative citizen in a difficult time."—Joe Klein, political columnist, Time.

This information about The Tyranny of Dead Ideas was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Matt Miller

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

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