Steve Keen's Debtwatch

As long-term read­ers of this blog will remem­ber, I chose Swags for Home­less as the char­i­ty to sup­port in my Walk to Kosciuszko in 2010. I was struck by the sheer prac­ti­cal­i­ty and inge­nu­ity of this char­i­ty. There are many groups try­ing to do some­thing for home­less peo­ple, but some initiatives–like home­less shel­ters, or pro­mot­ing social housing–take a long time to imple­ment and sim­ply can’t cater for the inflow of new home­less.

Swags got there in one step, with an inex­pen­sive, well-designed portable bed that gives a home­less per­son a good sleep, today, even though they are sleep­ing rough.

I have just had the fol­low­ing paper pub­lished in the freely acces­si­ble online jour­nal Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy, which is pub­lished by the Queens­land branch of the Eco­nom­ic Soci­ety of Aus­tralia.The cita­tion is:

Keen, S. (2011). “Debunk­ing Macro­eco­nom­ics.” Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis & Pol­i­cy 41(3): 147–167.

I’ve been pub­lished in peer-reviewed jour­nals that are freely acces­si­ble online before of course—such as the Eco­nom­ics E‑journal paper “Solv­ing the Para­dox of Mon­e­tary Prof­its”. I think Eco­nom­ic Analy­sis and Pol­i­cy does a bet­ter job of blend­ing the old paper-style jour­nal with the new, with a home page that emu­lates the cov­er of a paper jour­nal while pro­vid­ing hot links to the papers from that page.

My pub­lish­ers Zed­books have just asked me to remove Debunk­ing II from Ama­zon’s pro­gram. Amongst sev­er­al rea­sons, the eBook is avail­able from oth­er sources which is not allowed in the Ama­zon bor­row­ing pro­gram.

So if you want to read the book, you’ll just have to get hold of it the old-fash­ioned way: at book­stores.

Ama­zon UK: Paper­back; Kin­dle

USA: Paper­back; Kin­dle

Ger­many Kin­dle

France Kin­dle

Book­Topia (Aus)

Abbey’s (Aus)

Mel­bourne Uni (Aus)

I’ve just enrolled the Kin­dle edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics: the naked emper­or dethroned? in Ama­zon’s KDPS­e­lect pro­gram. This makes it avail­able for free bor­row­ing by Ama­zon Prime mem­bers for one month from the Kin­dle Own­ers Lend­ing Library.

Mem­ber­ship of Kin­dle Prime isn’t free–the cost is $79 a year. This fea­ture is obvi­ous­ly an attempt to expand that scheme, which also offers free two-day ship­ping and instant access to stream­ing of movies (out of a library of about 2500 titles right now). The encour­age­ment to authors like myself is a roy­al­ties pool of $500K per month, where each author’s share depends on how many times your books are bor­rowed out of the total pool of eli­gi­ble books.

I’ve had it. Sit­ting in the lounge wait­ing for my flight to Bangkok, I was casu­al­ly read­ing a Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald sto­ry about Kevin Rudd,  when this hap­pened.

Anoth­er BSOD! This is the first on this machine‑a Dell XPS15z–but it the third machine in a row in which I’ve had this expe­ri­ence.

The first was a Dell Stu­dio 17 which I pur­chased two years ago, and which had so many BSOD crash­es in so many inop­por­tune moments that I final­ly nick­named it Mephis­to and went in search of an alter­natve (see “My Dog of a Dell”).

Rob John­son of INET con­duct­ed a very detailed inter­view with me when I called in to INET’s offices en route to the launch of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics. INET has just released a blog entry with this inter­view in 7 parts:

http://ineteconomics.org/blog/inet/steve-keen-why-he-saw-it-coming-and-others-did-not

I’ve embed­ded the videos below (along with the com­men­tary from INET). I would also urge read­ers to take a look at INET’s web­site (and its blog), which both cov­ers and sup­ports a wealth of new approach­es to eco­nom­ics.

INET Interview

The two inter­sect­ing lines of sup­ply and demand pen­e­trate eco­nom­ics text­books like Ein­stein’s mass-ener­gy equiv­a­lence pen­e­trates physics text­books. The the­o­ry behind the two lines is inher­ent­ly flawed, says Steve Keen.

I have just been sent a tran­script of my inter­view on HARDtalk, done by Jane Ross, who (to quote her blog) is “a free­lance edi­tor spe­cial­iz­ing in per­son­al sto­ry”. Jane has post­ed the tran­script to her blog (“Steve Keen on the New Great Depres­sion”), and she has giv­en me per­mis­sion to repost it here.

Jane also kind­ly edit­ed it for printing–something for which I am very grate­ful. Often lan­guage will slip in a live inter­view, and you can say the oppo­site of what you intend­ed. This tends not to be noticed by lis­ten­ers (they appear to sub­sti­tute what you meant to say), but when it’s print­ed it can look stu­pid.

The Occu­py move­ment is broad­en­ing. I was just alert­ed to the exis­tence of this site:

Econ 4 peo­ple, 4 The Plan­et, 4 the future

They are call­ing for aca­d­e­m­ic and pro­fes­sion­al econ­o­mists to sign up, which I have done.

Occu­py Eco­nom­ics from Soft­box on Vimeo.

Thom Hart­mann is the most promi­nent of the very few pro­gres­sive eco­nom­ic and polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors in Amer­i­ca. Wikipedia notes that “In 2008, 2009, and 2010, Talk­ers Mag­a­zine named Hart­mann the tenth most impor­tant talk show host in Amer­i­ca, and num­ber 8 in 2011 defin­ing him as the most impor­tant lib­er­al host for four years in a row (the ones above Hart­mann are con­ser­v­a­tives).”

Thom inter­viewed me for his TV show The Big Pic­ture yes­ter­day, on the top­ic of whether we’re in a Depres­sion now, if so how this one com­pares to the 1930s, and whether such events are a part of cap­i­tal­is­m’s nat­ur­al cycli­cal­i­ty.

As not­ed in the post above, this speech has a lengthy dis­cus­sion with the audi­ence at the end, which is well worth lis­ten­ing to.