Jessica Irvine’s piece in today’s SMH

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(Edit: Please note that there is a foot­note to this sto­ry)

I nor­mal­ly don’t com­ment on arti­cles about me, since I am aware that now that my views are part of the pub­lic debate, I have to take the good with the bad in cov­er­age. I would­n’t have writ­ten this either, were it not for the line “If only his pre­dic­tions were so reli­able” in Jes­si­ca Irvine’s piece in today’s SMHWalk­ing on a wire stretched between stim­u­lus and debt”.

In a news­pa­per that sees itself as a paper of record, I would have expect­ed a bit of con­text here–some acknowl­edge­ment of the fact that I was call­ing a seri­ous finan­cial cri­sis from Decem­ber 2005, where­as con­ven­tion­al eco­nom­ic fore­cast­ers were pre­dict­ing falling unem­ploy­ment and ris­ing inflation–rather than a throw­away line like that.

This is the sort of com­ment that leads a lot of  blog­gers here to be deroga­to­ry about the MSM, because any­one who reads this and noth­ing else is less well informed than some­one who ignores the news­pa­pers and surfs the inter­net instead. As any read­er here would know, it does­n’t take long to come across Pro­fes­sor Dirk Beze­mer’s sur­vey “No one saw this com­ing: Under­stand­ing Finan­cial Cri­sis Through Account­ing Mod­els” ( see also his arti­cle on Vox) where I am acknowl­edged as one of about a dozen econ­o­mists who did call the GFC before it hap­pened.

As most read­ers here are aware, I spend a lot of my time defend­ing the main­stream media. Not this time, how­ev­er, because this time the point is obvi­ous: spend time read­ing the news­pa­pers, and have less knowl­edge about the world than you could get from the same time spent surf­ing the ‘Net.

Footnote

Hav­ing said the above, I now have to eat hum­ble pie some­what, and report that Jes­si­ca was quite gra­cious in our cor­re­spon­dence on this point. She not­ed that “I had hoped it was clear that although you were the head­line act, I was hav­ing a dig at all econ­o­mists for get­ting things wrong and also express­ing some sym­pa­thy because fore­cast­ing can be a mug’s game (admit­ted­ly one that the media feeds off).”

She then quick­ly arranged to have my com­ments con­vert­ed into a Let­ter to the Edi­tor (click on the link and search for “Keen”):

Not all predictions turned out badly

I must take issue with Jes­si­ca Irvine’s throw­away line about me, ”If only his pre­dic­tions were so reli­able” (”Walk­ing on a wire stretched between stim­u­lus and debt”, Feb­ru­ary 19). I am hap­py to acknowl­edge I lost the bet with Rory Robert­son, but I would have expect­ed some men­tion of the fact that I had been pre­dict­ing a seri­ous finan­cial cri­sis since Decem­ber 2005, where­as con­ven­tion­al eco­nom­ic fore­cast­ers were pre­dict­ing falling unem­ploy­ment and ris­ing infla­tion.

This sort of com­ment leads blog­gers to be deroga­to­ry about the main­stream media, because any­one who reads this and noth­ing else is less well informed than some­one who ignores the news­pa­pers, but surfs the inter­net.

There it does­n’t take long to come across Pro­fes­sor Dirk Beze­mer’s sur­vey ”No one saw this com­ing”: Under­stand­ing Finan­cial Cri­sis Through Account­ing Mod­els, which acknowl­edges me as one of about a dozen econ­o­mists who pre­dict­ed the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis.

Steve Keen Sur­ry Hills

So the out­come of this exchange returns me to some­thing that I not­ed I do fre­quent­ly in dis­cus­sions on the blog: defend the “MSM” (main­stream media) against some of the crit­i­cism it gets. While some of this is war­rant­ed, it’s also obvi­ous that the MSM has played a large role in enabling my non-ortho­dox views on eco­nom­ics to become wide­ly known. So like most issues in life, the MSM sto­ry is not entire­ly black and white.

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