This is from the 104th edition of the Real World Economic Review;
Steve is right, of course.
The whole article is available, free of charge, here. It includes a good MMT explanation of money creation using Minsky, which because of other work I still have to get to in a serious way.
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The most terrifying thing about this debate are that these economists are the people who ‘calculate’ the acceptable temperature rise our planet can sustain. Their models for that are as flawed as the rest of their thinking, as the climate events of this year are starting to show. Will humanity rethink things before it completely destroys itself and with it the earth’s current ecosystem?
The world is in the grip of a sort of Mafiosi Capitalism “(otherwise known as Market Fundamentalism) for the most part where the mindset is one of “Privatise the profits – Socialise the costs”!
Or even in the case of the UK’s water and sewage industry don’t even bother worrying about the environmental costs the government will turn a blind eye till it gets thrown out of office and then the successor that pliable u-turner Mr Starmer won’t do much to change our “waterway” robbery anyway:-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/04/henley-regatta-organisers-complain-of-sewage-pollution-from-thames-water
Thank you for sharing – that’s this evening’s pre-kip reading sorted out good and proper.
I never do economics then
That’s a time for novels or railways history
While not completely understanding either the myth or Keen’s explanation of it being so, it might help me if I knew how it either supports your own econimic proposals or doesn’t. I imagine it is supportive from your own provision of it and his humorous Python analogy.
A simple “yes it does” is fine, so I can read Keen a few more times!
Steve and I agree on this
What kind of a science is economic science i if there is no agreement on these kind of fundamentals.
Without having trawled through or fully understood the Keen stuff – the idea that double entry book keepig /accountancy is how we can track the money relationships in the economy consistently – preserving or conserving money as it pasess from one sector to another seems pretty persuasive and fundamental.
It is
What I particularly like, is that double entry book-keeping, the language of those arch conservative accountants, gets used to trash the claims of of economists.
There is a Pythonesque fantasy where accountants and economists get to fight it out, gladiator style… never thought Id be cheering on the accountants.
I think Steve has hit on something massive with this
Economists ignore double entry – and so the impacts they don’t want to mention. Minsky forces them to face the truth.
Economics is no more a science than I am an artist. I dabble, and so do economists with their attempts to graph relationships. But the word science means knowledge, and there are few facts to discover in this shifting murky scenario except that of historic evidence – future predictions cannot be nuanced enough to take in all the facets in my opinion to be reliable in the way a true science prediction can be relied upon. It’s an art not a science in my opinion
Maybe, but then Steve Keen and several other heterodox economists who why try to model the real world of banking and finance predicted the Great Recession (known as the GFC – Global Financial Crisis – here in Australia) .
Double entry was always the key to understanding money. Long before Adam Smith, there was Luca Pacioli; his significance, like Smith as an observer and forensic analyst of the observations, rather tha ‘discoverer’ has been underestimated. The intellectual historians have obsessively focused attention on Machiavelli (Pocock, Skinner); but Pacioli’s impact was more enduring, overwhelming and profound.