Debunking economics with Prof Steve Keen (7 June 2016)

Greening the Apocalypse (RRR FM)

We talk with Professor Steve Keen, Head of the School of Economics, Politics and History at Kingston University London. He’s one of the few economists who anticipated the Great Financial Crisis and says that mainstream economists failed to anticipate it, not because it was an unpredictable “Black Swan”, but because their theories give them blind spots, which caused them to ignore the cause of the crisis: banks lending too much money to finance speculation rather than investment. He’s also one of the few prominent economists with a bit of ecological literacy. His book Debunking Economics, first published in 2001, and now in an updated and expanded edition, explores these issues and more. He’s also behind a crowdfunded global financial modeling software project called Minsky which he believes could “hopefully mean that economists never again lead us blindly into a crisis like the Global Financial Crisis”. See his websites: www.debtdeflation.com/blogs | www.ideaeconomics.org