Below is Lecture 3 from Steve’s Advanced Political Economy class at the University of Western Sydney. The class offers an in depth critique of the failures of neoclassical theories, as well as detailing my approach to a new economics.
Lecture 3 — Neoclassical Production Fallacies
Geoff Davies
The Global Financial Crisis, the extreme inequality of wealth world-wide, the materialism of modern life and the dire state of the planet are not accidents, nor just unavoidable consequences of the nature of things. They are the result of the modern practice of economics, which makes elementary errors of accounting, evidence, perception and theory.
Many of these errors have been noted for decades, but only by a dissenting fringe of economists and informed others. Their message is drowned out by the relentless repetition of the mainstream free-market mantra. Though many people are uncomfortable with economists‘ pronouncements, and some are aware of some of the errors, few seem to realise how many and how basic are the errors, or how far-reaching are the consequences. Here are some of the main errors, spelt out in simple terms.
Micheal Pascoe wrote a great article yesterday entitled; Throwing money at housing is no cure for fear. He did a poetic job of contrasting recent record car sales to the continuing stagnation of the housing market. Michael referenced ‘the warning issued by the Reserve Bank two years ago about relying on residential real estate forever rising.’ To recap, Glenn Steven’s official statement was:
Please join the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Ontario team for an evening of wine, cheese and cutting-edge analysis about the risks in Canada and worldwide from the continued expansion of debt – featuring renowned Australian economist Steve Keen.
The Continuing Debt Bubble: What It Could Mean for Canada
Thursday, June 28, 2012
7:00–9:00 pm
The Arts and Letters Club
14 Elm Street, Toronto ON
Sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Ontario office, the Progressive Economics Forum, and Ryerson University’s Department of Politics and Public Administration.
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I’m giving a talk on Debunking Economics, and the future of economics, to the INET Young Scholars Initiative at 11am New York time today (5pm Central European time). The Young scholars have kindly agreed to let me open this event up to readers of this blog. Below is a bit more information about YSI from the organisers, and the login details for today’s talk.
The purpose of the Young Scholars Initiative is to find ways to support new economic thinkers at the earliest stages of their career trajectory, from graduate students to new junior faculty through to newly tenured faculty. So far a social media platform and a facebook group have been formed in an attempt to virtually recreate the energy and momentum generated at INET’s Berlin conference this April.
This is the first video on endogenous money from Steve’s talks at the Fields Institute in Toronto Canada. The talk covers a compressive introduction to endogenous money, along with some of Steve’s latest modeling developments. Here is a Primer on Endogenous Money:
In a very timely move, the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Economics established a hearing into the post-GFC banking sector. I was pleased to be invited to make a submission, which I completed just before leaving Australia for one month’s research into monetary economics with mathematicians at the Fields Institute in Toronto.
The submissions have just been made public. Mine is available here in PDF, and is also reproduced below. I have improved on my modeling of money creation in the last two weeks at the Fields, but I’ll leave details of that for a later post.
Here is a short insightful article from europe online magazine about panic and uncertainty over the Greek financial future. To quote the article:
We will have to wait and see what is to come after Sunday’s election outcome…
Check out Steve’s latest interview with Chris Martenson.
In his recent paper entitled A culture of mania: a psychoanalytic view of the incubation of the 2008 credit crisis , Professor Mark Stein develops a theoretical framework around the notion of a manic culture, comprised of four aspects: denial; omnipotence; triumphalism; and over-activity.
“A series of major ruptures in capitalist economies were observed and noted by those in positions of economic and political leadership in Western societies,” he said. “These ruptures caused considerable anxiety among these leaders, but rather than heeding the lessons, they responded by manic, omnipotent and triumphant attempts to prove the superiority of their economies.”
