(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 SMH “Walking 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.
