In this first podcast-style interview between me and Steve Keen, the author of ‘Debunking Economics’, Steve recounts how early encounters with neoclassical and neoliberal economics, and the realities of firm behaviour, led him to reject economic fairy tales and become a rebel.
His politics shifted too, from Vietnam-era conformity to organising for a political economy curriculum.
Today his priority is climate change. Economists’ models have trivialised existential risk and hobbled action with myths about government finance.
Steve broadly agrees with MMT’s “spend first, tax later,” but challenges Warren Mosler’s theories on trade, all of which mean that in the longer term he plans a wider assault on comparative advantage.
And, at the end of the interview, we may clear that this is the first of what might be a number of conversations with Next up a discussion on double-entry as the missing economic grammar and how and why he created his RAVEL software to model it.
00:00 – Introduction: Richard welcomes Steve Keen
01:15 – Steve Keen’s academic and professional background
03:00 – Debunking neoclassical economics
05:10 – Why Steve became a rebel economist
08:00 – Early influences: from physics to economics
10:15 – Discovering flaws in mainstream economic theory
13:30 – The theory of the second best and its implications
16:00 – Realizing textbooks were misleading
18:00 – Student activism and challenges to orthodox economics
20:30 – The birth of political economy at Sydney University
23:15 – Reading Marx and questioning the labor theory of value
26:00 – Annoying both neoclassicals and Marxists
28:30 – Writing Debunking Economics and exposing false maths
31:00 – Where Steve is now: climate change and economics
33:00 – Disagreements with MMT on trade theory
35:00 – Closing thoughts and next conversations
TRANSCRIPT
A transcript for this video is available at: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk
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ABOUT RICHARD MURPHY
Richard Murphy is Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School. He is director of Tax Research LLP and the author of the Funding the Future blog. His best-known book is ‘The Joy of Tax’.
This video was edited by Thomas Murphy.
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