Dr. Steve Keen on debunking economics

Today, Local Future published the lecture Debunking Economics by Dr. Steve Keen. Keen explains the fatal flaws in the thinking of modern, neo-classical economists, and how it led to the original publication of his book, and to the second revised edition, which will be available on October 25th on Amazon.

Dr. Keen returns to North America in November to share his knowledge, new research findings and an in-depth talk at The International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change: Vision, Action, Leadership (VAL 2011).

“Understanding how money works is essential to understanding peak oil and the economic crisis,” says Mr. Aaron Wissner, director of the conference. “Dr. Keen is to economics what M. King Hubbert was to peak oil.”

Dr. Steve Keen received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review in 2010 for being the economist who most cogently warned of the economic crisis, and whose work is most likely to prevent future crises. He is Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney and author of Debunking Economics.

In September, Dr. Keen was awarded $125,000 by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, a foundation established by George Soros to find more accurate ways of understanding economics. ( See It’s Time to Put Money into the Equation.)

Last summer, I learned about Dr. Keen after stumbling upon an article called ““No One Saw This Coming”: Understanding Financial Crisis Through Accounting Models, a research paper of a PhD student in Europe who was seeking economists who had clearly warned of the coming global economic collapse. His criteria was that the candidates had to have been in the mainstream media before the 2007, have published papers or other work on their reasoning, and have some sort of model for explaining why things were going to unfold the way they were forecasting.

After looking over all of the possible candidates, No One Saw This Coming detailed an alternate model of understanding economics, which the author called “the accounting model”.

I began researching this model, and the various economists cited in the paper, and found that Dr. Keen’s work most closely matched my understanding of economics, which I had been working on since first learning about peak oil in 2005.

Dr. Keen truly understands the how the economy actually works, and is building modern, computer simulations, that could even take into account how peak oil and oil decline draw money away from the economies of importing nations, which leads to pressure on the banks to approve more and riskier loans, and pushing the economy towards debt crisis.

His is what I consider “the missing piece” in the puzzle of how the economy works and how peak oil will impact the economy in the future.

We are very excited to be welcoming Dr. Keen back to the USA. Registration is now open for the conference. You are invited to attend and participate and interact with Dr. Keen and all the speakers at a gathering of equals. If you would like to speak yourself, an application is available on the conference web site.

The sustainability conference brings together visionaries, activists, and leaders as a gathering of equals to explore together visions for the future in areas of sustainability, peak oil, climate change, economics, politics, renewable energy, food security, transition towns, bioregionalism, permaculture, compassionate living and culture change. For registration and a list of speakers see the conference website.