Reposted from the Rethinking Economics website

Stu­dents at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty kicked off a cam­paign for a new approach to eco­nom­ics with the suc­cess­ful launch of new soci­ety Rethink­ing Eco­nom­ics Kingston this week.

Almost 100 peo­ple squeezed in to hear Pro­fes­sor Steve Keen – new­ly appoint­ed head of the School of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­to­ry – launch the new soci­ety with a speech on what’s wrong with main­stream eco­nom­ics and how stu­dents should change it.

Pro­fes­sor Keen — author of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics and well-known crit­ic of main­stream eco­nom­ics – described how the­o­ries taught in most eco­nom­ic class­es were unable to pre­dict, under­stand or even take on board the recent finan­cial cri­sis.

Taken at face value, David Cameron’s warning this week about risks in the global economy sounds like it might be wonderfully prescient. Here’s the country’s economic chauffeur, carefully checking his instrument gauges, and sure enough, sees the same signs today that should have given us warning of the crisis of 2007-08. Time to apply the brakes.

There’s only one prob­lem: the eco­nom­ic dash­board that Cameron relies upon did not warn of the cri­sis before it hap­pened. Instead, that dash­board advised Cameron and oth­er lead­ers around the world that every­thing was look­ing rosy, and that going full throt­tle was entire­ly safe.

The Crash Boom Pop! car­toon book ver­sion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics has just been cov­ered in the Wall Street Jour­nal:

Over­heard: Pow! Zap! Wham! Get Ready For Com­ic Book Eco­nom­ics

So Wall Street Jour­nal read­ers, if you’d like to pay back those main­stream econ­o­mists who forced you to suf­fer through class­es on the “Effi­cient Mar­kets Hypoth­e­sis”, or worse yet, assured you that the econ­o­my was fine in June 2007, head over to Kick­starter and fund a car­toon that will take the mick­ey out of them.

Click here to go to the Crash Boom Pop! Kick­starter page

This is late notice for a sem­i­nar being held tomor­row (Wednes­day 12^th) from 6–8pm at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty’s Pen­rhyn Road cam­pus in room JG4003 (4th floor of the main teach­ing build­ing at Kingston) to intro­duce the sys­tem dynam­ics mod­el­ing pro­gram Min­sky.

Sys­tem dynam­ics pro­grams allow dynam­ic mod­els to be con­struct­ed using flow­charts to define and sim­u­late the equa­tions of a sys­tem. Min­sky adds some­thing no oth­er pro­gram has: a sim­ple means of mod­el­ing finan­cial flows.

My fel­low Post Key­ne­sian and good mate Pro­fes­sor John Har­vey pub­lished an excel­lent piece on his Forbes blog today, point­ing out the fal­la­cy of com­po­si­tion in the pro-aus­ter­i­ty. He took his cue from anti-aus­ter­i­ty riots in Bel­gium:

Riot police have fired tear gas and water can­non dur­ing clash­es with demon­stra­tors as at least 100,000 peo­ple marched through Brus­sels in the first mass protests against gov­ern­ment aus­ter­i­ty mea­sures. (“Bel­gian pro­test­ers clash with police over pen­sions and pay”, BBC News Europe)

Then he point­ed out that the pro-aus­ter­i­ty argu­ment is fal­la­cy of com­po­si­tion. That’s a hard con­cept to get through—especially, it turns out, to con­ven­tion­al­ly trained econ­o­mists. So John used a bril­liant exam­ple from Amer­i­can foot­ball:

Car­toon­ist Miguel Guer­ra and I went on The Keis­er Report to talk about the project to pro­duce a com­ic book (or “graph­ic nov­el”) ver­sion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics. Check out the inter­view, and then please head over to either Kick­starter or Startjoin to help this project come into being. We’re inter­viewed in the sec­ond half of the show, start­ing at the 12 minute mark in the video below.

Samuel­son once wrote that he did­n’t care who wrote a coun­try’s laws, so long as he wrote the text­books. Let’s get in front of Samuel­son, and write the com­ic book that under­mines his text­books.

SOAS is hold­ing an event to recog­nise the late Fred Lee’s out­stand­ing con­tri­bu­tions to devel­op­ing a real­is­tic micro­eco­nom­ics.

Fred Lee

Date: 22 Novem­ber 2014

Time: 9:00 AM‑7:00 PM

Venue: Rus­sell Square: Col­lege Build­ings

Room: Khalili Lec­ture The­atre

Fred’s work is well known to Post Key­ne­sian econ­o­mists, espe­cial­ly through his mon­u­men­tal work Post Key­ne­sian Price The­o­ry, which doc­u­ment­ed the many empir­i­cal stud­ies into the actu­al cost struc­tures of firms–all of which con­tra­dict the fairy tale of ris­ing mar­gin­al cost por­trayed in main­stream eco­nom­ic text­books. He also cam­paigned to pro­mote the real­is­tic approach to eco­nom­ics that is the hall­mark of Post Key­ne­sian economics–in con­trast to the “let’s assume we have a can open­er” approach of Neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics.

The won­der­ful team of Erin Ade, Ed Har­ri­son and friends at Boom Bust did a fan­tas­tic item on the Crash! Boom! Pop! project. Check out the inter­view and the bril­liant graph­ics they put togeth­er to show­case Miguel Guer­ra’s artis­tic tal­ents. And then pop over to Kick­starter or Startjoin to help bring this project to life. The whole pro­gram is worth watch­ing, but the item on Crash! Boom! Pop! begins halfway through the show (14 min­utes & 50 sec­onds in).

If you want to get straight to the item, click on the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O‑AFmeP19mE#t=889

A bril­liant team of graph­ic artist Miguel Guer­ra, lay­out artist Suzy Dias, and writer Genevieve Tran have com­bined to pro­duce what I can describe as a “car­toon ver­sion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics”. They plan to pro­duce up to six graph­ic nov­els around the theme of “M” (Mon­ey, Mayhem–the Finan­cial Crisis–Method, Macro and Micro), to use visu­al media to take the mick­ey out of eco­nom­ics for those who don’t want to wade through a 500 page book.

They’re run­ning a Kick­starter cam­paign now–starting on the 85th anniver­sary of Black Tues­day 1929.

Rus­sell Stan­dish asked me to thank those who have donat­ed to keep him avail­able for the Min­sky project: A total of about $7500 has been raised to date.

I have set up the pay­ments now so that they go straight to Rus­sel­l’s Pay­Pal account. One user did ask about alter­na­tive pay­ment meth­ods; Rus­sel­l’s com­ment was that bank fees make a direct bank account trans­fer only worth­while either for an Aus­tralian dona­tion, or for a very large sum from a non-Aus­tralian bank account.

I am con­tin­u­ing to explore oth­er poten­tial fund­ing options–and there are a cou­ple of promis­ing leads. But until they come through, con­tin­u­ing sup­port from the com­mu­ni­ty would be most wel­come.