Steve Keen's Debtwatch

I have recently estab­lished a Patreon site https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen, where peo­ple can sup­port my research and advo­cacy work with dona­tions start­ing at $1/month. That is now where I will engage in con­ver­sa­tion in response to posts. So if any­one here wants to con­tinue a dia­logue with me and oth­ers, please sign up there.

This site was flooded by a large num­ber of spam users at the same time as I became unable to main­tain my own role in dis­cus­sions here, since I am just too damn busy in Lon­don. This has caused the site to be sus­pended three times by its ISP for per­for­mance issues. One more time and the account will be banned. I have there­fore decided to delete all users on this site, bar those who have made posts (which is a hand­ful of indi­vid­u­als of course).

I’m tak­ing part in a debate on one of the major top­ics in this year’s elec­tion, Brexit, on May 31st at 7.30pm at Can­ham, 40 Sheen Lane, Lon­don SW14 8LW. The other speak­ers are Frances Cop­pola, and Angus Arm­strong.

• Frances Cop­pola is an eco­nomic com­men­ta­tor in print and fre­quently on the BBC.
• Angus Arm­strong is direc­tor of macro-eco­nom­ics at one of the top research insti­tu­tions, the National Insti­tute of Eco­nomic and Social Research founded in 1938.

Click here to buy tick­ets for this event.

I’m freez­ing this site and mov­ing to both Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen) and a new web­site http://www.profstevekeen.com/. There are sev­eral rea­sons:

• This site’s signup secu­rity failed, and some­thing like 50,000 bot-users have signed up. 
  • It’s just too cum­ber­some in Word­Press to delete them selec­tively from here, so it’s eas­ier to move to a new, clean site;
• I used to be very active in dis­cus­sions here, but the demands on my time became so exces­sive over time that I have vir­tu­ally stopped par­tic­i­pat­ing;

One of my Patrons posed a very good ques­tion to me: in a nut­shell, how would I respond to a politi­cian who took my ideas and per­verted them for polit­i­cal gain? Here’s Andre’s full query:

Hi Steve, thank you, you’ve given me the gift of some of the most impor­tant ideas and expla­na­tions I’ve come across in my life­time.

I was won­der­ing how you might respond to a politi­cian who mis­reads your lat­est book, and then declares:

1.  Peo­ple will love me, because Steve Keen says I can become known as a mas­ter of man­ag­ing my country’s econ­omy by engi­neer­ing a pri­vate debt boom

Help me rebuild eco­nom­ics at https://www.patreon.com/ProfSteveKeen

Can we avoid another finan­cial cri­sis?

In 2008, con­ven­tional eco­nom­ics led us blind­folded into the great­est eco­nomic cri­sis since the Great Depres­sion. Almost a decade later, with the global econ­omy wal­low­ing in low growth that they can’t explain, main­stream econ­o­mists are reluc­tantly com­ing to realise that their mod­els are use­less for under­stand­ing the real world.

Click here to support me on Patreon

As I explain in this video, gov­ern­ment attempts to turn Uni­ver­sity entrance into a mar­ket­place have had the unin­tended side-effect of under­min­ing plu­ral­ist eco­nom­ics. The UK gov­ern­ment has removed con­trols on the num­ber of places that Uni­ver­si­ties can offer in first year courses, and as a result there has been an increase in human­i­ties places offered by highly ranked Uni­ver­si­ties. Final year high school stu­dents have flocked to these Uni­ver­si­ties, and enrol­ments at lower-ranked Uni­ver­si­ties have fallen sub­stan­tially.

A new organ­i­sa­tion called NEKS (for “New Eco­nomic Knowl­edge Ser­vices”, see www.neks.ltd) is hold­ing its inau­gural con­fer­ence on the eco­nom­ics of infra­struc­ture In West­min­ster on Tues­day Jan­u­ary 24^th, and you should attend.

Why NEKS, and why Infra­struc­ture? The eco­nomic impor­tance of infra­struc­ture is obvi­ous, but the actual per­for­mance of infra­struc­ture often dif­fers rad­i­cally from what is pre­dicted when it is being planned. Three forms of delu­sion make many infra­struc­ture projects far less ben­e­fi­cial than expected by their pro­po­nents: the com­plex­ity of exe­cu­tion is under­es­ti­mated, the ben­e­fits are over­es­ti­mated, and ben­e­fits are also cal­cu­lated poorly using dodgy eco­nomic the­ory.

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.

• Teach­ing Eco­nom­ics the Plu­ral­ist Way
• Steve Keen
• Kingston Uni­ver­sity Lon­don
• IDEAe­co­nom­ics
• Min­sky Open Source Sys­tem Dynam­ics
  www.debtdeflation.com/blogs
• Gen­eral Prin­ci­ples
• Teach Hon­estly: “Warts and All” treat­ment of every school

–Read the orig­i­nal sources—journals & books—not text­books

• Let experts teach maths & com­put­ing, not econ­o­mists
• Facts exist & are not the­ory-neu­tral

–Rules of account­ing ver­sus Money Mul­ti­plier

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.

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.