Steve Keen’s Debt Watch

This is a talk I gave in Amsterdam to launch the Amsterdam Rethinking Economics critique of the current state of economics “education” in the Netherlands. The text of my slides is reproduced below. [embedded content] Teaching Economics the Pluralist Way Steve Keen Kingston University London IDEAeconomics Minsky Open Source System Dynamicswww.debtdeflation.com/blogs General Principles Teach Honestly: “Warts and All” treatment of every school –Read the original sources—journals...

I’ve had some tough interviews over the years (such as the BBC HARDtalk! interview earlier this year with Stephen Sackur), but I’d have to credit the student interviewers at the University of Amsterdam’s Room for Discussion event with giving me the toughest, well-informed grilling my ideas have had in public. I’m following up later today with a keynote speech at the Dutch Rethinking Economics event tonight, and I’ll post that here later this week. [embedded content]...

Economic theory has failed to incorporate the role of energy in production for two centuries since the Physiocrats. In this video I derive a production function that includes energy in an essential manner. It implies that economic growth has been driven by the increase in the energy throughput capabilities of machinery. NOTE: As a viewer pointed out, I should set alpha to 0.3 rather than 0.7 here. I swapped usual treatment of which input was raised to alpha but forgot to swap the values as...

Apparently it’s the fifth anniversary of the day I gave this talk, to the Occupy movement in Sydney, in Martin Place, right outside the offices of the Reserve Bank of Australia. The day after, the site was shut down by the police. It seems I was jinxed, because the same thing happened in New York, the day after I simply dropped off a couple of copies of my book Debunking Economics. The speech holds up pretty well, though I’ve developed my technical arguments a lot since then....

I was interviewed by the Raoul Pal Real Vision online investor TV program recently. This five minute excerpts covers some of the main points, including the cause of the 2008 crisis, and why mainstream economists missed it; why the economy is moribund today; how a "modern debt jubilee" could reduce private debt and enable a recovery in credit-based demand to occur; and the need to reform the finance sector so that it is profitable for it to finance entrepreneurs rather than asset bubbles....

The Austrian School shares the same theory of value foundations as the Mainstream, but rejects its use of both equilibrium thinking and equilibrium-oriented mathematical modelling. I cover Hayek, complexity, and the Austrians most Austrians reject, Joseph Schumpeter.

The Austrian School shares the same theory of value foundations as the Mainstream, but rejects its use of both equilibrium thinking and equilibrium-oriented mathematical modelling. I cover Hayek, complexity, and the Austrians most Austrians reject, Joseph Schumpeter.

The first 4 minutes and 42:40 till 52:30 are devoted to administrative and representative issues at Kingston. The rest of the lecture covers the evolution of the "Neoclassical" Mainstream from Walras's puzzle of "Can a set of free markets reach equilibrium in each and every market at once?" to the current criticism of the mainstream by leading Mainstream economists today. NOTE: I didn't record the first lecture of this year's course due to misplacing a necessary cable. If you'd like to see...

(1) The "Smoking Gun of Credit", including graphs for Malaysia and Singapore [Minutes 0-6] (2) Why Credit is a fundamental component of aggregate demand and income [5-19] (3) Designing a monetary model in free Open Source system dynamics program Minsky [19-52] (download from https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/) (4) Building a cyclical model in Minsky [52-End]

Neoclassical microeconomics is based, not on "simplifying" assumptions that omit insignificant details of reality to focus on the significant issues, but on "counter-factual" assumptions which flatly contradict what we know about significant economic issues. I cover: (1) Friedman's methodological assertion that "assumptions don't matter" was actually done to advise economists NOT to read empirical literature contradicting the idea of rising marginal cost [Minutes 1-5]; (2) The logical...