Steve Keen's Debtwatch

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.

To any­one out there with deep pockets–or to lots of peo­ple with shal­low­er ones–I need finan­cial assis­tance for the Min­sky pro­gram. I have been wait­ing for fund­ing from a source that I’ll reveal once it final­ly comes through, but it has now been delayed for over six months from when it was first moot­ed to arrive. If I am lucky, it will come through in January–another 4 months away.

The prob­lem is that I may lose my pro­gram­mer by then to the vicis­si­tudes of hav­ing to earn a liv­ing. I have been the archi­tect of Min­sky, but Rus­sell Stan­dish has been the builder, and I was incred­i­bly lucky to secure his ser­vices when the project began 3 years ago.

This is the talk I gave at the first con­fer­ence of the Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dent Ini­tia­tive for Plu­ral­ism in Eco­nom­ics, held in the beau­ti­ful Ger­man town of Tue­bin­gen, Ger­many on Sep­tem­ber 19–21 2014.

I cov­er Min­sky, mon­ey, com­plex­i­ty, the role of debt in aggre­gate demand & aggre­gate sup­ply, and the eco­nom­ic cri­sis. I spoke too fast and cov­ered top­ics at too high a lev­el for many of the under­grad­u­ate stu­dents in the audi­ence who are part of the rebel­lion against the dom­i­nance of eco­nom­ics tuition and research by Neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics. I hope putting it up here gives those stu­dents and oth­ers a chance to “hit the pause but­ton” and go through my talk more slow­ly.

Scot­land vot­ed 55:45 to remain in the UK, but the very fact that the vote was even close was a seri­ous shock to the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment in Europe. UK Prime Min­is­ter David Cameron had orig­i­nal­ly allowed only a Yes or No vote on full inde­pen­dence in the ref­er­en­dum, rather than a three-option poll includ­ing the “Maybe” of a greater devo­lu­tion of pow­er from White­hall to Edin­burgh, in the belief that the No vote would be so resound­ing that it would ter­mi­nate the inde­pen­dence move­ment per­ma­nent­ly. The Maybe, he believed, might well have got across the line, when in gen­er­al he and the Tories didn’t want to cede any pow­er north of Hadrian’s Wall.