As a public figure, I’m quite accustomed to seeing my name and face in the media. But it was still quite a surprise to load The Sydney Morning Herald’s site on Monday last week and see my craggy visage staring back at me from the front page:
The reason was Peter Martin’s article “A Keen eye on the global economy: how our forecasters fared”, which reported the results of the Melbourne newspaper The Age’s annual survey of economic forecasters.
This article begins with a tweet from the US economic blogger Noah Smith, who posts at Noahpinion:
Here we go, I thought – yet another mainstream attack on my non-mainstream economics. But why on earth would he see Minsky – my simulation program for modelling the economy as a fundamentally monetary system – as basically absurd? Because “DSGE modelling is so much better”, perhaps? Or because there are so many other good system dynamics programs already, why produce another one?
In the last four decades, there have been only a handful of central bank and Treasury papers that I thought genuinely added to human knowledge. The economic-oriented departments within governments have in general been even more dominated by neoclassical orthodoxy than academic departments – and for good, bureaucratic reasons.
The usual suspects are talking up the prospects for Australian property prices as the New Year approaches, with permabull and Australian Property Monitors senior economist Andrew Wilson forecasting 3–5 per cent growth nationally, and BIS Shrapnel managing director Robert Mellor calling for between 2 and 8 per cent growth for Sydney.
Such calls range from just equal to, to well above, the expected rate of consumer price inflation. So they’re a return to the usual property mantra that house prices always rise faster than consumer prices because of the “fundamentals” of (a) a rising population and (b) tight supply.
A mature age student who will commence doing a PhD with me in 2013 has need of work prior to commencing his degree.
He has a background in finance, risk measurement, and anti-money laundering. He has also worked as a security guard, and traffic controller, and is willing to consider any other temporary work.
Please contact me at debunking@gmail.com if you have or know of a position, whether full-time, part-time, temporary or permanent.
As regular readers would know, I have been developing a computer program for building strictly monetary dynamic macroeconomic models. New readers might have seen this article in The Economist:
Reforming macroeconomics: Claudio Borio on the financial cycle
where my work received the following mention:
Steve Keen, an Australian economist, has long argued that macro needs to incorporate these ideas, and has developed a prototype of a computer program, called “Minsky,” that can be used to model economies as monetary systems. So while most economists have not embraced Mr Borio’s agenda for the reformation of macro, some have. That is encouraging news. (Click here for Claudio Borio’s paper)
This week’s post returns to the topic I discussed just two weeks ago (Fiscal cliff lessons from the ’30s, November 26). I wrote that last post after I had given Congressman Dennis Kucinich a presentation on the fiscal cliff, and he asked me to return to Washington to give a public briefing in Congress. Today’s post is the document I spoke to at that briefing, and it’s substantially more detailed than the draft published two weeks ago.
Click here to read the rest of this post
Video of the talk:
Video of the slides:
Swags for Homeless, the Australian entrepreneurial charity that has designed a brilliant portable bed for homeless people, has entered a movie “Home” into the Focus Foward short film contest.
The film is now a semi-finalist, and your vote can help it get to the Sundance Festival, and possibly even win the $100,000 prize. Swags would use the exposure and the prize money to establish operations in the USA–a country that has a desperate need to make the life of its many homeless less miserable.
Outgoing Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich arranged for me to give a briefing at Congress today on the Fiscal Cliff, and how the downturn of 1937 could be a foretaste of what will happen if the Cliff comes to pass.
I argue that an attempt by the government to reduce its debt now may trigger a renewed bout of deleveraging by the private sector–and this is what appeared to happen in 1937, when confidence that the worst of the Depression was over led to the government reducing its deficit.
My presentation at the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation in Berlin today on how Neoclassical economics misunderstands the role of private debt in a capitalist economy. I show how to use my Minsky program to model both the Neoclassical “Loanable Funds” vision of lending and the empirically-informed Post Keynesian “Endogenous Money” model.
I’m also about to start a Kickstarter campaign to raise additional funds to develop Minsky. Please “watch this space” and be ready to help promote this campaign and help fund it. Minsky as it stands has been written by one programmer in about 800 hours. I want to be able to hire 3 programmers for a minimum of 2 years to fully develop the program.
