Swinburne Talks

Published in January 31st, 2010

I’m giving two talks at Swinburne University of Technology on Thursday February 4th. The information below is reproduced from the flyer for the event developed by regular blog contributor Matt Mitchell, who has arranged the talks:
12.00pm – 2.00pm: DebtWatch : Observations and reflections on the educative role of modern media

Dr Keen will discuss his experience using [...]

CSIRO-UNEP Addendum

Published in January 31st, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

3 Comments

I forgot to post my presentation file in the first version of this post. I’ve since edited it, but I know that a lot of people using RSS feeds would not notice the change. So here is the presentation that I gave at that talk to UNEP in November:
The Powerpoint File
A PDF version

CSIRO-UNEP Modelling

Published in January 30th, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

35 Comments

The United Nations Environment Program did a very unusual and far-sighted thing last year: it asked the CSIRO to produce a version of its biophysical model of the Australian economy for developing countries, and to pair that with an economic model which had to be non-equilibrium in nature.
The Stocks and Flows Resource Modelling team at [...]

Debtwatch No. 42: The economic case against Bernanke

Published in January 24th, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

344 Comments

The US Senate should not reappoint Ben Bernanke. As Obama’s reaction to the loss of Ted Kennedy’s seat showed, real change in policy only occurs after political scalps have been taken. An economic scalp of this scale might finally shake America from the unsustainable path that reckless and feckless Federal Reserve behavior set it on [...]

Google–lower bandwidth version

Published in January 22nd, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

34 Comments

A number of readers have complained that the video of my talk at Google took up too much bandwidth, resulting in “jerky” vision. Here are the same two files in a somewhat lower quality compression–half the size of the original files.

As one viewer noted, it is also feasible to download the files to your PC [...]

Talks@Google

Published in January 20th, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

88 Comments

Google runs a regular seminar series on topical issues, which I spoke at last week. There was a substantial audience (see the quick scan of the audience below) and Google’s staff lived up to their hyper-intelligent and hyper-engaged reputation.

I gave a presentation that combined my standard talk on debt and Minsky, with some exposition of [...]

The Ignoble Prize for Economics

Published in January 13th, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

235 Comments

The Real World Economics Review Blog–which is run by PAECON, the “Protest against Autistic ECONomics”–has just launched “The Ignoble Prize for Economics“.
The intent is to select by popular vote the “three economists who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse (GFC)”.
Nominations are now open, and anyone can nominate up to three individuals by visiting this page and [...]

How expensive is housing?

Published in January 12th, 2010

Posted by Cassander in Debtwatch

106 Comments

This is often treated as a “how long is a piece of string?” question, but The Economist has performed a great public service by allowing an easy comparison of the length of this piece of string across many countries and over time.
Check it out yourself. For Australian readers, house prices today are almost 2.5 times what [...]