Uncategorized

The head of cybercrime prevention in France tweeted yesterday that any attempt by Elon Musk to prevent linking to sites or comments which do not break the law is in fact, the assertion of editorial control. Musk seems to be preventing links partly to anyone he personally has a problem with, but in particular to... Read more

In my first column in this series, I gave Hyman Minsky’s explanation of what caused the stagflation of the 1970s—a credit bubble bursting when the economy was absolutely at its peak caused the stagnation, while high wage and oil price rises caused the inflation. I finished with the essence of Milton Friedman’s very different explanation: … Continue reading "This Ain’t Your Daddy’s Inflation Part Two"

I’ve been focusing on the economics of climate change for over four years now, because it’s the most pressing problem facing humanity, and because economists have done such a god-awful job on it—fooling themselves into regarding an existential threat as a minor cost-benefit problem (Keen 2020; Keen et al. 2022). For circumstantial reasons, I can’t … Continue reading "Back to the history of economic thought: “Keynesian Economics” failed in 1935"

I owe enormous intellectual debts to Hyman Minsky and Augusto Graziani. But at one point, my “little knowledge” led me to believe, falsely, that they had both made a huge mistake in claiming that repaying debt destroyed money: Graziani: As soon as firms repay their debt to the banks, the money initially created is destroyed. … Continue reading "A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing"

I’m getting a prize in economics myself this week—the Friede-Gard Prize for Sustainable Economics—and I was going to ignore the Nobel Prize for Economics, which is always awarded to economic insiders rather than rebels like me. But then they gave it to Ben Bernanke. This was just too much: to me, it was like awarding … Continue reading "The Nobel Prize for Mediocrity and Irrelevance Goes To…"

The fact that the Friede-Gard Prize is awarded in Trier, the town where Karl Marx was born, is entirely coincidental: it just so happens that the creators of the Prize (which began in 2021) live near Trier. Nonetheless, it’s a fitting coincidence for me to receive the prize here, since my academic career began with … Continue reading "Receiving the Friede-Gard Prize in Marx’s home town"

As a close friend and colleague of Michael Hudson (Hudson 2004, 2018), I was aware of much of the content of David’s Debt: the First 5000 Years (Graeber 2011) before I read it. But David weaved the tale of debt into the recorded history of humanity in a way that made it revelatory, even to … Continue reading "Tribute to David Graeber"

There’s a popular belief that capitalism succeeds because it enables the best product in any industry to survive, while the poorer products lose out. There’s also a popular belief that the market leads to “lock-in”: an inferior concept will come to dominate a product space, and improvement becomes impossible because all subsequent developments are forced … Continue reading "How Capitalism Kills Good Software"

A recent episode of the Debunking Economics podcast annoyed quite a few people, and I couldn’t be happier. The episode, shown and linked in the graphic below, considered the sustainability of the economic growth that capitalism has spawned over the last 250 years (hint: it isn’t), and as part of it, I took a swipe … Continue reading "Who reads whom in economics?"

I’m in the middle of a large consulting project on economics and climate change, and I’m also developing and delivering a set of seven “Mastermind” lectures, which you would have seen advertised on social media (a marketing firm is handling the messaging, which is why some people have thought it’s not me putting out the … Continue reading "Using accounting to prove the core propositions of MMT and Endogenous Money"