Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I was inter­viewed by Gor­don Long for the Finan­cial Repres­sion web­site last week. The video is below; a brief sum­mary of our dis­cus­sion is posted on the Finan­cial Repres­sion web­site and repro­duced below.

PROF. STEVE KEEN TALKS

FINANCIAL REPRESSION

THE ART OF GETTING AN EDUCATION IN ECONOMICS

Pro­fes­sor Steve Keen has found that top flight uni­ver­si­ties are dom­i­nated by very nar­row, doc­tri­naire teach­ing. This styl­ized view has resulted in crit­ics of this view only get­ting jobs in low rank­ing uni­ver­sity. With pride Steve Keen puts his lat­est uni­ver­sity in that camp. “If you want a good edu­ca­tion in Eco­nom­ics, you don’t go to a good uni­ver­sity. The wider range of thought and diverse ana­lyt­ics is found at the lower rank­ing uni­ver­sity. Kingston Uni­ver­sity is one of those clas­sic university!”

I was inter­viewed by Lelde Smits for the Finance News Net­work on my recent trip back to Syd­ney. Below is the begin­ning of the tran­script; you can read the rest by click­ing on this link. Or click below to watch the inter­view with Lelde.

Tran­script of Finance News Net­work inter­view with Kingston Uni­ver­sity Head of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­tory, Dr Steve Keen

Lelde Smits: Hello, I’m Lelde Smits for the Finance News Net­work and join­ing me from London’s Kingston Uni­ver­sity is Head of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­tory, Dr Steve Keen. Steve, wel­come back to Syd­ney and to FNN.

In the oth­er­wise for­get­table movie Cock­tail, when Tom Cruise’s char­ac­ter Brian Flana­gan abruptly splits with his date Bon­nie, she pleads with him not to let their rela­tion­ship end badly. He replies “every­thing ends badly: oth­er­wise it wouldn’t end.”

The tur­moil in for­eign exchange mar­kets caused by Switzerland’s abrupt end­ing of its Euro peg may be such a bad moment for the Euro—and it comes fig­u­ra­tively moments before another likely bad moment, the elec­tions in Greece on Jan­u­ary 25^th that will in all like­li­hood bring the anti-austerity party Syriza to power. Will the Euro, like Flanagan’s rela­tion­ship in Cock­tail, end badly—and abruptly—soon?

The British elec­tion cam­paign has begun, and Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron is run­ning with the slo­gan that his Con­ser­v­a­tive Party will deliver “A Britain liv­ing within its means” by run­ning a sur­plus on day-to-day gov­ern­ment spend­ing by 2017/18. It is, as the UK Tele­graph noted, hardly an inspir­ing slo­gan. But it is one that res­onates with vot­ers, because it sounds like the way they would like to man­age their own house­holds. And a house­hold budget—whether you bal­ance yours or not—is some­thing we can all under­stand. If a house­hold spends less than it earns, it can save money, or pay down its debt, or both. So it has to be good if a coun­try does the same thing, right?

Some months ago, Jesse Columbo approached me about writ­ing an online col­umn for Forbes Mag­a­zine. That seemed a bet­ter fit for me than the Australian-oriented Busi­ness Spec­ta­tor, where I have been blog­ging for the last few years, so I decided to make the move. I’ll soon post my first col­umn at this loca­tion. I’ll fol­low the same approach with this blog as before, which is to post a teaser to a story here and then link through to the Forbes arti­cle. I’ll also con­tinue to post videos and inter­views directly here, as I do now.

I’m now doing a reg­u­lar spot with Simon Rose on Share Radio, a new inter­net radio sta­tion ded­i­cated to eco­nomic and finan­cial issues.

Simon Rose, Share Radio’s evening host.

To lis­ten to our lat­est conversation–covering Greece, aus­ter­ity, and why run­ning a sus­tained gov­ern­ment sur­plus is a great way to cause a future eco­nomic cri­sis, click on the play but­ton below.

I gave talks to stu­dents in Berlin and Ham­burg last week at the invi­ta­tion of of Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics groups at Berlin Free Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Ham­burg. Both groups asked me to cover some of the cri­tiques of main­stream eco­nom­ics that I pro­vide in Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, as well as cov­er­ing the mon­e­tary approach to Post Key­ne­sian eco­nom­ics that has been the focus of most of my more recent pub­lic lectures.

Bravo to Les Edi­tions de l’Atelier, the pub­lish­ers of L’Imposture Economique (the French trans­la­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics), who have achieved the seem­ingly impos­si­ble: L’Imposture Economique entered the Top Ten out of all books on Ama­zon France yes­ter­day (Decem­ber 4th 2014). It was the top-selling non-fiction book, out­rank­ing even Piketty’s Cap­i­tal (as I write, L’Imposture is #12 in books while Cap­i­tal is #53).

I don’t expect it to last at that rank­ing, but I didn’t expect it to achieve that posi­tion in the first place, so it feels great to see it there. Con­grat­u­la­tions again to Les Edi­tions de l’Atelier, and to Gael Giraud who took the ini­tia­tive in arrang­ing its trans­la­tion into French.

The Guardian’s senior eco­nom­ics com­men­ta­tor Aditya Chakrabortty has pro­duced an excel­lent BBC Radio 4 pro­gram on the fail­ure of aca­d­e­mic eco­nom­ics to reform itself after the Crash of 2007: Teach­ing Eco­nom­ics After the Crash. The first inter­view is with Kingston University’s own Devrim Yil­maz. It also includes me, George Soros, Andy Hal­dane, Ha-Joon Chang, the stu­dents who began the Post Crash Eco­nom­ics Soci­ety at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity, Diane Coyle (who played a large role in devel­op­ing the CORE cur­ricu­lum, of which I’m very crit­i­cal), Philip Mirowski (who describes CORE as “lip­stick on a pig”), Rob John­son of INET, and many more. It’s well worth a lis­ten (it opens with about 20 sec­onds of a promo for a later pro­gram on a paralympian):