Steve Keen's Debtwatch

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.

I gave two talks in Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty on my recent trip to the UK. Since I was talk­ing to aca­d­e­m­ic audi­ences, these talks were rather more tech­ni­cal in nature than those I nor­mal­ly give. The two lec­tures are very sim­i­lar and last about 40 min­utes, but the video of the sec­ond is much longer because I record­ed the dis­cus­sion that occurred after the lec­ture (I tried to record the dis­cus­sion at the first lec­ture as well, but my recorder ran out of bat­tery pow­er half way through).

This is a very good inter­view record­ed at the VAL con­fer­ence on sus­tain­abil­i­ty I attend­ed in Michi­gan ear­li­er this month.

You can lis­ten to it by click­ing the link below:

Steve Keen’s Debt­watch Pod­cast

I you’d like to down­load the audio, please go to Kay­eemo’s pod­cast site:

http://c‑realm.com/podcasts/crealm/284-stocks-flows-the-mego-effect/

Giv­en the qual­i­ty of this inter­view, I would rec­om­mend sub­scrib­ing to Kay­eemo’s pod­casts.

The HARDtalk inter­view, which was held over from Mon­day due to the renewed upris­ing in Egypt, will go to air in about 20 min­utes time. If you don’t have cable access to the BBC World Ser­vice, you can watch it via Lives­ta­tion, as I will be doing:

http://beta.www.livestation.com/bbc-world