Steve Keen's Debtwatch

“Neat, Plausible, and Wrong: the deluded discipline of economics”

Blog mem­ber Robert Kahn has booked the River­side Suite for 5–8pm. The first hour will be meet and greet; I’ll give a talk with the above title from 6pm. After ques­tions and dis­cus­sion we’ll adjourn to some­where near­by for din­ner (sug­ges­tions welcome–somewhere that has low noise lev­els please since I have very bad hear­ing cour­tesy of a seri­ous case of tin­ni­tus).

Robert has forked out $500 to make the book­ing, so I’d appre­ci­ate atten­dees mak­ing dona­tions to him of about $20–25. With the expect­ed num­ber of atten­dees, that should spread the finan­cial pain even­ly.

I’ve done a demo­li­tion der­by on Neo­clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics in the pre­vi­ous 6 lec­tures; for the next 6, I’ll build a real­is­tic alter­na­tive. First stop is the impor­tance of the endo­gene­ity of mon­ey in utter­ly revis­ing macro­eco­nom­ic analy­sis. In the first half of this lec­ture, I out­line the basic propo­si­tions in endoge­nous mon­ey, and some of the dis­putes that have arisen in the very ear­ly days of this the­o­ry. By way of anal­o­gy, the state of endoge­nous mon­ey the­o­ry today would be a bit like the ear­ly days of the Coper­ni­can mod­el of the solar sys­tem: the fun­da­men­tal idea is cor­rect, but many of the argu­ments that peo­ple make about it reflect con­fu­sion about a new con­cept.

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: