This is well worth watching, from my friend Steve Keen, We keep saying we'll do some stuff together but it's not happened as yet:
Steve has been genuinely innovative. That cannot be said of many people.
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Seems like a 13 year old has a better understanding of economics than some economists
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/09/26/651948323/episode-866-modern-monetary-theory
If anyone has time it is a good podcast to listen to.
Agreed
I should out that up….
Seconded – Steve is compulsory reading/viewing for anyone questioning todays dominant economic thinking. He’s very entertaining as well which as an economist, makes him even rarer!
Robin Stafford says:
” — Steve is compulsory reading….[….] He’s very entertaining as well which as an economist, makes him even rarer! ”
Ooops !…. might have been diplomatic to add in parenthesis, ‘present company excepted’..(?) or words to that effect 🙂
Richard has them rolling about on the trading floors, and dealing rooms in the City, on a regular basis. They don’t understand a word of it, of course, poor dears, but …it’s the way he tells them. 😉
Have you seen my stand up turn?
i) Flowcharts – sounds like yours
ii) Using a flowachart model for the whole economy sounds like the Gosbank approach…
A little bit more than Gosbank! Steve was simplifying heavily. Add in feedback loops, complex relationships and maths – stuff that most economists working in academia or the City would not understand with their jumped up spreadsheets and statistical methods. Check out his stuff on Minsky if you are really interested. Or read this:
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~wbarthur/Papers/Complexity%20&%20Economy%20Preface.pdf
Steve is building on ideas that have been around for a while. Also try Eric Beinhocker’s The Origins of Wealth
Exactly Robin – Keen pointed out that one of Neo-liberalism’s faults is that it over-simplifies the complexity in the real world.
That is also why the City and the Tories don’t want unions, decent wages and want shareholders to have all the power so that they can transfer all the risk that they choose to ignore onto ordinary people or unsuspecting clients.
I got turned onto Steve Keen by George Monbiot in the Guardian.
Monbiot thought that Keen was very egotistical which I felt was not really important and detracted from his article somewhat (you need a bloody ego to take on the idiots who dominate economic thinking these days). The article was about money supply and where I first heard of the concept of ‘base money’.
I then bought his book ‘Debunking Economics’ which to me was head and shoulders over anything that was written at the time (and certainly before) – even Will Hutton’s ‘The State We are In’ – because Keen went deeper than anyone else before into Neo-lib mythology – the fine print so to speak.
His approach for me also steered me from the path of taking a strictly Marxist view of economic issues – going from comparative study of economic thought to exposing the underlying assumptions instead.
The book took me ages to finish but I was glad of it. Steve Keen is why I am here today and why he gave me the basic tools to take on the wasting disease that is Neo-liberalism.
Finally, Keen also helped me to discover other Aussie economists (such as Bill Mitchell) and put Australia on the map as far as modern economic thinking is concerned – as well supporting the view that the questioning of Neo-liberal orthodoxy was not just a localised phenomenon – it is happening everywhere.
And that is what we want.
Keen’s book was a real eye opener for me too
All agreed re Steve – bit of a character but you’d have to be. Turned up dressed as a monk at the last talk of his I went to.
Partly it was the maths that did it for me – I studied the maths of chaos and non-linearity back in university engineering as a bit of a side track (odd vibrations and resonances…). Left me with a lasting view that most relationships and patterns, especially where people are involved are intrinsically non-linear. Yet for most people that seems to be hard to accept and well beyond their maths knowledge – especially uber-linear accountants! Environmentalists and meteorologists have been on the case for decades, as have some economists (see article posted above), notably Steve. The BofE is starting to work on it but don’t know how far they’ve got.
The most telling thing for me was incredibly simple
He punted our that perfect competition assumes a very small number behaves in the same way as zero. Of course, it does not. And that blows the whole theory apart
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
“Monbiot thought that Keen was very egotistical….”
You’ve just got to laugh………. haven’t you? 🙂
I too found Debunking a real eye opener. It confirmed what I’d always suspected, that the economics I was taught – and continued to be taught – was a load of bunkum. My ex, a communist/economist, said that the chapter on Marx was bunkum, but I never got round to reading that.
Carol – if you were ‘taught’ economics, have you read Econocracy? Really takes apart how economics is taught in the so-called top universities. I especially like Andy Haldane’s intro (Chief Economy at BofE) where he describes the economists he recruits as ‘not fit for purpose’. He may not be Leon Trotsky but he’s something of a radical in those deeply conservative bunkers. Worth keeping an eye on him as he’s the closest we’ve got to a mole.
If I remember correctly Carol, Keen had good things and bad things to say about Marx (I think Keen says this above too) in his book Debunking Economics. Keen thought Marxism was still a very strong base from which to approach capitalism critically (and I agree). Again if I remember correctly Keens concern was with flaws in the ‘labour theory of value’ which is used (amongst other things) as the key to unlock the door to socialism in Marxist ideology.