Category Archives: Debtwatch

I’ve just come back from the annu­al Insti­tute for New Eco­nom­ic Think­ing con­fer­ence in Paris, where the Pres­i­dent of INET Rob John­son is infa­mous for open­ing every ses­sion he chairs with an apt set of lyrics from the 1960s. I’ve aped Rob here by mis­quot­ing one of Bob Dylan’s great lines “You don’t need a weath­er­man to know which way the wind blows”. In fact, you do.

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My inter­view starts at 3 min­utes 48 sec­onds into the pro­gram.

A Twit­ter fol­low­er accused me of being “a lit­tle nasty” with my last blog post (see Fig­ure 1). He was right, and I don’t apol­o­gize.

I’ve spent 40 years try­ing to high­light just how lim­it­ed the dom­i­nant ideas in eco­nom­ics are. But even I didn’t ful­ly appre­ci­ate how tiny the intel­lec­tu­al gene pool behind these ideas was.

Then, as I start­ed to write a post on the eco­nom­ic issues in the Bernanke-Sum­mers debate, I re-read Sum­mers’ orig­i­nal sec­u­lar stag­na­tion post and real­ized that, not mere­ly were the ideas com­ing from a sin­gle per­spec­tive, most of the major pro­po­nents of these ideas came not only from the same Uni­ver­si­ty (MIT), and even the same sem­i­nar (Class 14462, con­duct­ed by Stan­ley Fish­er).

Ben Bernanke has recent­ly start­ed blog­ging (and tweet­ing), and his open­ing top­ics were why inter­est rates are so low around the world, and a cri­tique of Lar­ry Sum­mers’ “sec­u­lar stag­na­tion” expla­na­tion for this phe­nom­e­non, and for per­sis­tent low growth since the finan­cial cri­sis. Sum­mers then replied to Bernanke’s argu­ment, and a debate was on.

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There are many ways that you can divide the world into two groups. Men and women, for example—with the for­mer being about 50.2% of the pop­u­la­tion and the lat­ter 49.8%. Or those that like math and those that don’t—where there are no accu­rate fig­ures, but I’d haz­ard a guess at a 10% to 90% split.

The UK Chap­ter of the Inter­na­tion­al Sys­tem Dynam­ics Soci­ety invit­ed me to speak about my Min­sky soft­ware at its annu­al con­fer­ence on March 26. This is my talk, where I poked some fun at econ­o­mists and their igno­rance of sys­tem dynam­ics. The Pow­er­point file and Min­sky files used are down­load­able from here–see below the video.

Pow­er­point File

Use “right-click” and “Save as” to down­load these files, oth­er­wise your brows­er will fill up with XML code (since Min­sky saves in XML for­mat):

Min­sky Sim­plest Bank­ing File

Min­sky For­mat­ting File

Min­sky Loan­able Funds file

The Finan­cial Cri­sis of 2007 was the near­est thing to a “Near Death Expe­ri­ence” that the Fed­er­al Reserve could have had. One ordi­nar­i­ly expects some­one who has such an experience—exuberance behind the wheel that caus­es an almost fatal crash, a binge drink­ing escapade that ends up in the inten­sive care ward—to learn from it, and change their behav­iour in some pro­found way that makes a repeat event impos­si­ble.

A Twit­ter cor­re­spon­dent remind­ed me of this inter­view from two years ago in Ire­land, where the top­ic was pre­dom­i­nant­ly the Euro, the Maas­tricht Treaty, and the like­li­hood of a polit­i­cal break in Europe due to aus­ter­i­ty.

The dis­cus­sion has quite a bit of rel­e­vance to what is hap­pen­ing in Greece now–and what may hap­pen in Spain lat­er this year. Hence I thought it was worth re-post­ing it.

@andywattoes @ProfSteveKeen Remem­ber Steve on a show in Ire­land 2012 https://t.co/Y86QtzNulr

— Shane Hes­kin (@shaneheskin) March 27, 2015

Dur­ing the 1890s Depres­sion, the busi­ness­man Jacob Cox­ey devel­oped the idea that the unem­ployed should be hired by the gov­ern­ment to work on the bad­ly dilap­i­dat­ed roads. His idea cul­mi­nat­ed in a march on Wash­ing­ton by over 10,000 peo­ple, and his arrest for tram­pling Con­gress’s lawns. This 1994 doc­u­men­tary by the Mas­sil­lon Muse­um tells his sto­ry.

Jacob Cox­ey was rid­ing home one day and expe­ri­enced the poor con­di­tions of the road in the 1890s. He also saw many unem­ployed men walk­ing the streets look­ing for work. He had the idea to put unem­ployed men to work towards prob­lems like fix­ing roads. He took this idea and made the Good Roads Bill in 1892. He pre­sent­ed it to Con­gress, but that’s as far as it went. He teamed up with Carl Browne.

I par­tic­i­pat­ed in a very enjoy­able dis­cus­sion with philoso­pher Ken Gemes and sci­ence author David Boda­nis (author of e=mc2: A Biog­ra­phy of the world’s most famous equa­tion) on sci­ence ver­sus non-science–with par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to eco­nom­ics. You can lis­ten to the hour-long dis­cus­sion by click­ing on this link: Philoso­fa Pod­cast. The full episode details (includ­ing the pod­cast and a down­load­able MP3 file) are avail­able here: The Philoso­fa Episode 2: Sci­ence Ver­sus Pseu­do­science.