Steve Keen’s Debt Watch

The posi­tion of the econ­omy in the envi­ron­ment is a shared blindspot in eco­nom­ics: no exist­ing school han­dles the topic well, and yet this is the key issue we need to under­stand. I explain the Laws of Thermodynamics–as well as I could in an intro­duc­tory class with­out using mathematics–and pro­vide some links to impor­tant top­ics that stu­dents wouldn’t nor­mally hear about in an eco­nom­ics degree. [embedded content] Click here for the Pow­er­point slides....

The position of the economy in the environment is a shared blindspot in economics: no existing school handles the topic well, and yet this is the key issue we need to understand. I explain the Laws of Thermodynamics--as well as I could in an introductory class without using mathematics--and provide some links to important topics that students wouldn't normally hear about in an economics degree.

This lec­ture cov­ers the Post Key­ne­sian school of thought in eco­nom­ics, focus­ing mainly on its mod­ern empha­sis upon endoge­nous money, sec­toral bal­ances, and Minsky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­ity Hypoth­e­sis. I also show how to do non-equilibrium mod­el­ing (using my Open Source mod­el­ing pro­gram Min­sky of course). [embedded content] Click here to down­load the Pow­er­point slides.

Paul Krugman’s lat­est col­umn—“Check Out Our Low, Low (Nat­ural) Rates” (which he didn’t flag as “Wonk­ish”, even though it is so in spades—noted that the “nat­ural real rate of inter­est” was falling, and that this jus­ti­fied the low inter­est rate set by the Fed­eral Reserve. And this made me think about Karl Marx. Click here to read the rest of this post.

Actu­ally they’ve done no such thing. But they do effec­tively assume that it’s unnec­es­sary all the time. This tran­scen­den­tal truth became appar­ent to me in the reac­tions I have had from main­stream econ­o­mists to a lec­ture I gave to my Kingston stu­dents this month (which is posted on my YouTube chan­nel and blog). Click here to read the rest of this post.

Post Keynesians diverged from the mainstream when Hicks re-imagined Keynes as a marginalist. Defining features include an emphasis upon realism in modeling, behavior uncertainty, and an empirical and inductive approach to developing theory. In this brief lecture I cover the three modern strands of Endogenous Money, Stock-Flow Consistent Modeling, and Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis

This lec­ture intro­duce the Aus­trian school of thought, which is closely related to the Neo­clas­si­cal mainstream–in that it shares its util­i­tar­ian the­ory of value, accepts basic sup­ply and demand analy­sis, and sees cap­i­tal­ism as gen­er­ally tend­ing towards equi­lib­rium. But it is also highly crit­i­cal of the main­stream for the absurd assump­tions about indi­vid­ual knowl­edge that it is will­ing to make to pre­serve its equilibrium-oriented math­e­mat­i­cal approach. It...

The Austrian school of thought is closely related to the Neoclassical mainstream--in that it shares its utilitarian theory of value, accepts basic supply and demand analysis, and sees capitalism as generally tending towards equilibrium. But it is also highly critical of the mainstream for the absurd assumptions about individual knowledge that it is willing to make to preserve its equilibrium-oriented mathematical approach. It sees capitalism's strengths as how it encourages innovation, which...

This talk covers all "the usual suspects" for me--the Neoclassical obsession with equilibrium, financial instability, the Loanable Funds myth and the reality of Endogenous Money, and the foolishness of governments trying to run a surplus as if they are households, when the better analogy is that they are banks and should run deficits to create part of the money supply the non-bank private sector needs.[embedded content] Click here to download the Powerpoint file (Minsky files are embedded...

A talk to the Edinburgh University Society for Economic Pluralism (EUSEP) covering the inherent instability of capitalism, why Loanable Funds is nonsense, and why the government should normally run a deficit.