Steve Keen's Debtwatch

Discussion (32) ¬

1. 
   DrBob127

   January 20, 2011 at 12:16 pm | #

   Prof Keen,

   Here is an article from ZeroHedge that refers to a world economic forum report on global debt.

   I hope that you find it to be useful

   http://www.zerohedge.com/article/total-global-debt-has-double-over-200-trillion-2020-preserve-economic-growth
2. 
   cyrusp

   January 20, 2011 at 4:54 pm | #

   mahaish, China and Russia have stopped using the dollar in bilateral trade. India is buying oil from Iran and paying in gold. The world is slowly but surely moving away from the dollar.

   I too am in the short term deflation camp but in the long run hyperinflation seems like a distinct possibility for the US no?
3. 
   sj

   January 20, 2011 at 7:30 pm | #

   Mr Keen
   John Snow the man who put the miasmas story of bad air to the tiolet and ask government authorities for clean water by removing the water pump handle was the greatest scientist and engineer of his time.
   Maismas today are complex mathematics that measure risk and forget that fat long tails can blow up our financial system?
   Maismas today think they make rational decisions with feeling and emotions that are in reality irrational and dangerous?
   To remove the water pump handle you need transparency open accounting and reality that as human being we are irrational and make bad decisions because of our herding behaviour.
   Mr Keen will you have a chapter on miasmas of human emotion for herding, envy,greed and irrational thinking?
4. 
   BrightSpark1

   January 21, 2011 at 1:18 am | #

   Hello Steve

   I see what you mean about “clueless in Denver” from your previous post.

   All of the other speakers came up with many words but said nothing of any value proving that they are lost or clueless as you said.

   The first comment I would like to make about David Colander’s two “jokes”. The one about Looking only under the light tells it all and reveals the total lack of awareness of the neoclassicals first mistake, that is ignoring the importance of time. Not only do they look only under the light but they only look at a snapshot at a single instance of time and are oblivious to the way in which factors change with time. Not only do you need to look at such snapshots but you need to be taking a sufficient number of them to be able to catch the fastest changes that are occurring. For example if snapshots of a moving automobile are not taken at a sufficient frequency they will give an impression that the wheels are turning backwards while the car is moving forwards, the well known stroboscopic effect. The mathematics which reveals the minimum sampling rate for accurate description of what is happening was devised by Nyquist in the thirties and it is a vital part in the algorithms which enable the video of the talks, if they did not do this the mess would be even worse than just wheels turning backwards.

   His second “joke” about the physicist estimating the building height by making a pendulum, and the engineering timing the falling ball shows a profound ignorance of the capabilities and roles of physicists and engineers. The one about the economist swapping a ball and string for the “blue prints” well —??? An engineer would have approved the drawings of the building and any engineer would know this and would know that it would cost much more than the value of a ball and string to gain access to them. A boy scout would be able to estimate the height to a far greater accuracy than would be possible using the two year 9 school science experiments proposed.

   To put his whole silly analogy into 21st century perspective; twenty years ago I bought a 20 megabyte hard disk drive for $400 about $1600 or more in today’s money and about forty years ago I worked with a huge drum storage system of the same capacity, about as big as a small truck and costing tens of thousands of dollars. A month ago I bought a 2,000,000 megabyte disk drive for $105. How has this happened? For the latest advance two physicists working “in the dark” and taking lots of samples discovered the Giant Magnetoresistive effect and won a true Nobel prise in 2007 for doing so (Grünberg and Fert), then engineers worked out how to use that to give us this latest generation of mass storage devises.

   To make things worse, now it is not considered economically rational to pay physicists and engineers to look “in the dark”. Research “in the dark” is being discouraged more and more in the western democracies where the neoclassicals hold sway, directed research is considered more “rational”. Neoclassicals even infest other disciplines with their stupid ideas!

   I like the whole idiotic DSGE bit it claims to be “dynamic” but does not explain the role of time and it claims to be “stochastic” so that its failure can be attributed to random “black swan” events, it claims to be “general” having universal applicability, and the “equilibrium” has never been proven in either theory or practice. In short is is garbage and never has or never will be applicable in any way.

   I would like to answer a following speaker’s question “what are we going to teach undergraduates?”. I say that if you have to ask that question you should not be teaching them anything you should leave that to Professor Steve Keen.

   Finally Steve two suggestions, firstly I think you need to consider simplifying the introduction to the “Lets do the time warp again” chapter of your book and add some simpler examples these people and many others without engineering and scientific knowledge (less and less people have such knowledge now, with very few understanding for example the gyroscope) need a more gentle introduction to help them understand the profound influence of time and secondly you should change the title to “Impeaching Economics”.

   Many thanks for your efforts and please don’t despair I believe it is is possible to soar like an eagle even if you are surrounded by turkeys.

   Cheers and a happy new year to you and the other bloggers.
5. 
   sirius

   January 21, 2011 at 6:42 am | #

   @Derek

   “”Is it just me or does anyone else get a “video not found” error for the last recording? The rest of them all work Just Fine. “”

   I had the same problem. Given the “difficulty” I had watching the previous videos I felt it was a “blessing in disguise”.

   My curiousity was such that I figured that if nobody else complained about the missing video then it would appear that other people were also not watching them all the way to the end.

   The problem is that the URL is corrupted. Although by fiddling around I was able to download http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/talks/AEA2011MacroAfterCrisis_MoseleyColanderDavidsonKeenDutt09.flv and http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/talks/AEA2011MacroAfterCrisis_MoseleyColanderDavidsonKeenDutt10.flv but there was no sound with the video image.
6. 
   Steve Keen

   January 21, 2011 at 9:34 am | #

   Thanks Brightspark,

   And if you saw cluelessness in some of the speakers of this session, wait till you hear the recording of the talks at the “50th anniversary of Rational Expectations” session!