Steve Keen's Debtwatch

One year after the start of the great­est eco­nom­ic cri­sis since the Great Depres­sion, the edi­tor of the jour­nal Amer­i­can Eco­nom­ic Review: Macro­eco­nom­ics claimed that “the state of macro [the­o­ry] is good”. How could he be so delud­ed? Macro­eco­nom­ics has been dis­tort­ed by appalling schol­ar­ship and a mis­guid­ed belief that macro­eco­nom­ics and micro­eco­nom­ics should be con­sis­tent. The best crit­ics of this, iron­i­cal­ly, include the econ­o­mist most respon­si­ble for the state of macro­eco­nom­ics, John Hicks and the archi­tect of Neo­clas­si­cal growth the­o­ry, Robert Solow.

Pow­er­point Slides (for Debt­watch Sup­port­ers & Above) Part 1

Late last year, the research and bro­ker­age firm CLSA com­mis­sioned me to write a report on the Aus­tralian hous­ing mar­ket. CLSA was found­ed 25 years ago  by jour­nal­ists who were dis­sat­is­fied with the qual­i­ty of exist­ing jour­nal­ism in finance–which then, like today, was often more pub­lic rela­tions than inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism. The com­pa­ny ded­i­cat­ed itself to inde­pen­dent research, and that tra­di­tion has been main­tained through own­er­ship changes that now see it oper­at­ing as a sub­sidiary of Cred­it Lyon­nais SA.

I’ve had a query from a jour­nal­ist:

There is a hand­ful of peo­ple around the world whose work I respect because it intel­li­gent­ly address­es facets of our cur­rent predica­ment that I don’t.

The eco­nom­ic and demo­graph­ic ana­lyst Har­ry Dent is one of those peo­ple.

Har­ry uses empir­i­cal data about con­sump­tion lev­els and pop­u­la­tion growth to accu­rate­ly pre­dict eco­nom­ic trends. A per­son­’s con­sump­tion pat­terns change as they age, so infor­ma­tion on the rate of growth of pop­u­la­tion and its age char­ac­ter­is­tics can be used to pre­dict what con­sump­tion will prob­a­bly be of a giv­en com­mod­i­ty some years in the future.

I’ll be in New York very briefly (while en route to the launch for Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II in Lon­don), on Fri­day Sep­tem­ber 23rd.

A blog mem­ber, Robert K, has kind­ly vol­un­teered to coor­di­nate a talk, if there are suf­fi­cient peo­ple inter­est­ed in attend­ing.

If you’ll be in New York that day and you’d like to attend a talk by me–probably a rehearsal of the talk I’ll give when launch­ing Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics II, but I’m open to oth­er sug­gest­ed top­ics as well–then please let Robert know via his email, which in spam-lim­it­ing form is:

amy­daykahn “AT” comcast.net

For this post in PDF, click here: CfE­SI Mem­bers; Debt­Watch Mem­bers; Signup CfE­SI; Signup Debt­watch

Chris Joye’s reply to my last post on hous­ing pro­vides a neat segue into the broad­er top­ic of why I entered the pub­lic debate on eco­nom­ics in the first place. It was because in Decem­ber 2005, I became con­vinced that a major glob­al eco­nom­ic cri­sis wasabout to hit. I felt that some­one had to raise the alarm, and that—at least in Australia—I was prob­a­bly that some­body.

A num­ber of new mem­bers have asked how to change their pass­word after log­ging on to the site. The process is rel­a­tive­ly sim­ple, but it’s easy to miss the menu since it’s so sub­tle.

When you log in, a menu with two items in it–your blog name and the word “Dashboard”–appear at the top of the page, on the same line as the Search win­dow but at the left hand end of the screen:

Click on your name and this drop down will appear:

Choose “Edit My Pro­file” and you get this man­age­ment screen:

A blog mem­ber has point­ed out that the Gus­tave Tuck the­atre is actu­al­ly in Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, not the LSE.

The sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics will be launched at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don on Octo­ber 4th, from 6–8pm.

The address is Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Gow­er St, WC1E 6BT Lon­don. Two map ref­er­ences are:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=WILKINS+BUILDING@51.524699,-0.13366&ie=UTF8&ll=51.524699,-0.13366&z=16

and

http://streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=529573&y=182293&z=0&sv=51.524699,-0.13366&st=7&mapp=map.srf

The sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics will be launched at the Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don on Octo­ber 4th, from 6–8pm.

The address is Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don, Gow­er St, WC1E 6BT Lon­don:

The venue is the Gus­tave Tuck lec­ture the­atre in the Wilkins Build­ing (nav­i­ga­tion instruc­tions here).

If you are going to attend, please post a com­ment here. At a lat­er stage, I may be able to link to a book­ings page (atten­dance is free–this will just be to keep track of num­bers), but for now this is the best way to let the organ­is­ers know how many peo­ple to expect.

Debt­watch has been oper­at­ing since March 2007, and in that time it has grown from a sim­ple means to get my month­ly newslet­ter out into a major alter­na­tive eco­nom­ics web­site.

The work­load to main­tain the site has become enor­mous: I have to write posts, admin­is­ter this site, par­tic­i­pate in its active dis­cus­sions (and keep them civ­il), all on top of my “day job” as a Pro­fes­sor of Eco­nom­ics and Finance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of West­ern Syd­ney. And I have to con­tin­ue devel­op­ing the research that made Debt­watch pos­si­ble in the first place: my efforts since 1997 to turn Min­sky’s Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis into a ful­ly fledged macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el, as an alter­na­tive to the var­i­ous delu­sion­al Neo­clas­si­cal mod­els that have dom­i­nat­ed eco­nom­ics ever since John Hicks penned his utter­ly mis­lead­ing car­i­ca­ture of Key­nes’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry back in 1936.