Steve Keen's Debtwatch

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.

My talk at the “ ‘Eco­nom­ics With Jus­tice” sem­i­nar series at the The School of Eco­nom­ic Sci­ence in Man­dev­ille Place, Lon­don. I cov­er where the argu­ment for aus­ter­i­ty came from, a thought exper­i­ment about what will hap­pen when a gov­ern­ment runs a sus­tained sur­plus, and a mod­el show­ing what hap­pens when the gov­ern­ment does run a sur­plus.

These are two lec­tures on endoge­nous mon­ey in macro­eco­nom­ics from the Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty Polit­i­cal Econ­o­my Mas­ters mod­ule “Eco­nom­ic Change and Ideas”, which I gave yes­ter­day (Fri­day March 6th). I will wait till next year before post­ing the entire lec­ture series, since I’m giv­ing them for the first time this year and they are a bit rough. But one stu­dent could­n’t make yes­ter­day, and I had two lec­tures in one day to make up for my absence next week when I’m attend­ing my niece’s wed­ding in Syd­ney. So these are post­ed for my absent stu­dent and any­one else who is inter­est­ed.

These should be two of the eas­i­est ques­tions to answer in eco­nom­ics; after all, mon­ey is the one thing that we all use in an economy—surely we know what it is, and where it comes from?

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I was inter­viewed by George Gal­loway on his show Sput­nik about the HSBC scan­dal, and bank­ing scan­dals in gen­er­al. Click here to see the show, or watch it below on YouTube:

Son­ny Kapoor just tweet­ed this, and is sim­ply has to go viral.

I was invit­ed by the Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics stu­dent asso­ci­a­tion at the Lon­don School of Eco­nom­ics to give a talk about Greece, Aus­ter­i­ty, Post Key­ne­sian Eco­nom­ics and antic­i­pat­ing the cri­sis. There was an excel­lent audi­ence of around 150 for the talk, and a good dis­cus­sion after­wards: the stu­dents there are keen (par­don the pun) to learn about non-Neo­clas­si­cal approach­es to eco­nom­ics, which are taught at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty, but which they said they do not learn from their cours­es at the LSE itself.

I was inter­viewed last night on the BBC News Chan­nel about the Greek cri­sis. Nego­ti­a­tions today seem to have bought some breath­ing space, but the issues raised here will now become dom­i­nant. Hav­ing gar­nered a 4 month exten­sion and time to rede­fine the macro­eco­nom­ic aspects of the EU pack­age, Syriza will now have to car­ry the day with its con­stituen­cy and polit­i­cal rivals back in Greece.

BBC News Chan­nel Inter­view

A Twit­ter cor­re­spon­dent point­ed out a sim­ple fact that makes Schäuble’s inflex­i­bil­i­ty in nego­ti­a­tions with Varo­ufakis explic­a­ble: though he is a Min­is­ter of Finance, his PhD is in law.

So is he implic­it­ly approach­ing these nego­ti­a­tions as a lawyer would? Because from that point of view, what the Greeks are try­ing to do is to renege on a con­tract.

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