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.

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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 have observed and appre­ci­at­ed Olivi­er Blanchard’s intel­lec­tu­al jour­ney over the last decade. It began in August 2008, with what must be regard­ed as one of the worst-timed papers in the his­to­ry of eco­nom­ics. In a sur­vey of macro­eco­nom­ics enti­tled “The State of Macro”, he con­clud­ed, one year after the finan­cial cri­sis began, that “The state of Macro is good” (Blan­chard, 2008). How­ev­er, Blan­chard did not remain locked into that posi­tion, and he had the rare intel­lec­tu­al courage to say so in pub­lic and in aca­d­e­m­ic papers. His most recent post, before the one I am respond­ing to today (“Fur­ther Thoughts on DSGE Mod­els: What we agree on and what we do not”), stat­ed that, far from the state of macro being good:

For decades, main­stream econ­o­mists have react­ed to crit­i­cism of their method­ol­o­gy main­ly by dis­miss­ing it, rather than engag­ing with it. And the cus­tom­ary form that dis­missal has tak­en is to argue that crit­ics and pur­vey­ors of alter­na­tive approach­es to eco­nom­ics sim­ply aren’t capa­ble of under­stand­ing the math­e­mat­ics the main­stream uses. The lat­est instal­ment of this slant on non-main­stream eco­nom­ic the­o­ry appeared in Noah Smith’s col­umn in Bloomberg View: “Eco­nom­ics With­out Math Is Trendy, But It Does­n’t Add Up”.

Fig­ure 1: Noah’s tweet announc­ing his blog post

A cliché—“Expect the Unexpected”—has hap­pened. As I not­ed in “The Divi­sive Brex­it Vote”, though I favoured Brex­it, I took the opin­ion polls at face val­ue, and expect­ed that Britain as a whole would vote to remain in the EU. Instead, in the largest elec­toral turnout in twen­ty years, the UK vot­ed 52:48 in favour of leav­ing the EU.

I’ll leave a post-mortem of the vote itself for lat­er; the main inter­est now is what will hap­pen because of it. Many pun­dits from the Cen­ter, Left and Right opposed Brex­it in the belief that eco­nom­ic Armaged­don for Britain and the globe would flow from it; we’ll now see how real­is­tic their fears were. I regard them as seri­ous­ly overblown, for a num­ber of rea­sons.

Andrew Watt has writ­ten a pas­sion­ate cri­tique of my sup­port for Brex­it (“Pro­gres­sive econ­o­mists should sup­port Remain not Brex­it – a response to Steve Keen”), and it high­lights a key fea­ture of this pecu­liar ref­er­en­dum: peo­ple who nor­mal­ly find them­selves on the same side in most eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal debates have been divid­ed by this ref­er­en­dum.

Andrew com­ments that he broad­ly agrees with my eco­nom­ic analy­sis on most issues, but vehe­ment­ly oppos­es me here. Like­wise, good friends like the het­ero­dox econ­o­mist Geof­frey Hogdg­son; Ann Pet­ti­for, who led the suc­cess­ful Jubilee 2000 cam­paign to can­cel the debt of the world’s poor­est nations; and Yanis Varo­ufakis, who knows a thing or two about the EU, all strong­ly sup­port Remain.

For decades, some of the most impor­tant data about mar­ket economies was sim­ply unavail­able: the lev­el of pri­vate debt. You could get gov­ern­ment debt data eas­i­ly, but (with the out­stand­ing excep­tion of the USA—and also Aus­tralia) it was hard to come by.

That has been reme­died by the Bank of Inter­na­tion­al Set­tle­ments, which now pub­lish­es a quar­ter­ly series on debt—government & private—for over 40 coun­tries. This data lets me iden­ti­fy the sev­en coun­tries that, on my analy­sis, are most like­ly to suf­fer a debt cri­sis in the next 1–3 years. They are, in order of like­ly sever­i­ty: Chi­na, Aus­tralia, Swe­den, Hong Kong (though it might deserve first billing), Korea, Cana­da, and Nor­way.