Steve Keen's Debtwatch

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.

You’ve just made your morn­ing cof­fee, and look up in hor­ror as you realise that the gas burn­er has set your kitchen ablaze. So you take deci­sive action: you pour your cof­fee on the floor.

Such is the real impact of the Euro­pean Cen­tral Bank’s lat­est attempt to revive the Euro­pean econ­o­my, which cut rates a whop­ping 0.1 per cent (from 0.15 per cent to 0.05 per cent), and increased the neg­a­tive inter­est rate imposed on bank reserve deposits from a huge ‑0.1 per cent to a gar­gan­tu­an ‑0.2 per cent.

I have a ridicu­lous­ly large num­ber of pub­lic talks com­ing up this month. It all starts on Wednes­day Sep­tem­ber 10^th, and does­n’t let up until Sun­day Sep­tem­ber 21^st—the day before Induc­tion Week begins at Kingston Uni­ver­si­ty, where I am now Head of Eco­nom­ics, Pol­i­tics and His­to­ry, and com­mit­ted to mak­ing Kingston the world’s lead­ing cen­tre for plu­ral­ist edu­ca­tion and research in eco­nom­ics. Check the links below if you’re able to make any of these talks in, in order: Sheffield; New York; Glas­gow; Kingston; and Tub­in­gen, Ger­many. I’ll cov­er talks in Octo­ber in a sub­se­quent post.