Shoot them in the head

I am anxiously awaiting the release of John Quiggin’s new book Zombie Economics. Daniel Drezner’s review of it contained this little nugget of truth (emphasis added):

All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics.

Obviously Drezner is talking about Quiggin's arguments against and the Chicago school. But even outside of that context that statement seemed to me to be pointed in the right direction.