Author Archives: Cassander

As most Aus­tralian read­ers would know, I recent­ly lost half of a bet over Aus­tralian house prices when the Gov­ern­men­t’s “First Home Own­ers Boost”–which I pre­fer to call the First Home Ven­dors Boost–reignited Aus­trali­a’s house price bub­ble.

As a result, I’m walk­ing from Aus­trali­a’s Par­lia­ment House to Aus­trali­a’s high­est moun­tain, Mt Kosciousko–a dis­tance of 224km (140 miles). The walk will start at 2pm on Thurs­day April 15 from the entrance to Par­lia­ment House and–my legs willing–finish 8 days lat­er on the sum­mit of Mt Kosciousko (which is 2228 metres–or about 7000 feet–above sea lev­el).

Peter Switzer inter­viewed me on his cable TV show for Sky News last week.

You can watch the inter­view here. I would also rec­om­mend watch­ing the inter­view with John Hew­son (for inter­na­tion­al view­ers, John Hew­son was a pre­vi­ous leader of the Lib­er­al Par­ty of Aus­tralia, which despite its name is Aus­trali­a’s con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal par­ty), in which amongst oth­er things he not­ed that Cen­tral Bank inde­pen­dence, for which he had cam­paigned while a politi­cian, had not worked out as he had hoped, and had instead left unac­count­able econ­o­mists in charge of mon­e­tary pol­i­cy.

Vot­ing is now open for what has been renamed the Dyna­mite Prize in Eco­nom­ics.

The renam­ing was nec­es­sary because the own­ers of the Ig Nobel Prize object­ed to the similarity–which is under­stand­able. They also sug­gest­ed the Dyna­mite Prize as a use­ful alter­na­tive.

We are, after all, intend­ing to award the prize to the three econ­o­mists who did most to drop the GFC bomb on the glob­al econ­o­my, via their naive and utter­ly unre­al­is­tic the­o­ries of eco­nom­ics.

The selec­tion process pro­duced the fol­low­ing set of nom­i­nees:

• Fis­ch­er Black and Myron Scholes
• Eugene Fama
• Mil­ton Fried­man

I am giv­ing a talk on the blog today at Swin­burne Uni­ver­si­ty in Mel­bourne, and frankly I am not all that pre­pared on the main issue of inter­est to the organ­is­ers there, which is the edu­ca­tion­al impact of this blog (and blog­ging in gen­er­al) ver­sus oth­er forms of edu­ca­tion.

I just estab­lished this blog to get the Debt­watch report out ini­tial­ly, and it’s grown in both size and per­son­al­i­ty in ways that I nev­er envis­aged. It’s been very grat­i­fy­ing, but I haven’t real­ly had the time to reflect on they whys and hows of the process of blog­ging.

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 his Debt­watch­blog on which he posts reg­u­lar arti­cles for dis­cus­sion and the role of this media in both edu­cat­ing the pub­lic and stim­u­lat­ing debate among econ­o­mists, stu­dents and lay peo­ple around eco­nom­ic the­o­ry and prac­tice.

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

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 CSIRO Sus­tain­able Ecosys­tems, which main­tains this bio­phys­i­cal mod­el, approached me in July to see whether I would be will­ing to attempt the devel­op­ment of that non­equi­lib­ri­um mul­ti­sec­toral eco­nom­ic mod­el.

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 over 20 years ago.

Some may think this would be an unfair out­come for Bernanke. It is not. There are sol­id eco­nom­ic rea­sons why Bernanke should pay the ulti­mate polit­i­cal price.

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.

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

As one view­er not­ed, it is also fea­si­ble to down­load the files to your PC and view there with­out band­width prob­lems dur­ing play­back.

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.

| Open Play­er in New Win­dow

I gave a pre­sen­ta­tion that com­bined my stan­dard talk on debt and Min­sky, with some expo­si­tion of the Cir­cuit and Min­sky mod­els, befit­ting of an audi­ence to whom sim­u­la­tion is no big deal–unlike eco­nom­ics con­fer­ences where such approach­es are still fringe activ­i­ties.