Steve Keen: A Rebel Economist’s Journey

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 – …