Steve Keen

For the Scottish football manager and former player, see Steve Kean.

Steve Keen
File:SteveKeen01.jpg
Born	(1953-03-28) 28 March 1953 Sydney
Nationality	Australia
Academic career
School or tradition	Post-Keynesian economics
Influences	Hyman Minsky Piero Sraffa Joseph Schumpeter François Quesnay Irving Fisher Basil Moore
Contributions	Mathematical models of financial crises and debt-deflation
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticizing neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen's thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, and François Quesnay. He also gives credit to Marx for contributing to the "financial instability hypothesis" of Hyman Minsky. His recent work mostly concentrates on mathematical modeling and simulation of financial instability.

He was formerly a professor of economics at University of Western Sydney, until he was fired in 2013, as well as charged with “serious academic misconduct” by the university. Currently, he is a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Development, and as of autumn 2014 will become a professor and Head of the School of Eco­nom­ics, His­tory and Pol­i­tics at Kingston University in London.

Early life and education

Keen was born in Sydney in 1953. His father was a bank manager. Keen graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1974 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1976 both from the University of Sydney. He then completed a Diploma of Education at the Sydney Teachers College in 1977.

In 1990, he completed a Master of Commerce with Honours in Economics and Economic History at the University of New South Wales. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy in Economics at the University of New South Wales in 1998.

Financial instability and debt deflation

Most of Steve Keen's recent work focuses on modeling Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis and Irving Fisher's debt deflation. The hypothesis predicts that an overly large debt to GDP ratio can cause deflation and depression. Here, the falling of the price level results in a continually rising real quantity of outstanding debt. Moreover, the continued deleveraging of outstanding debts increases the rate of deflation. Thus, debt and deflation act on and react to one another, resulting in a debt-deflation spiral. The outcome is a depression. Steve Keen argues that the current global economic crisis is the result of too much debt.

Debunking Economics

Keen's full-range critique of neoclassical economics is contained in his book Debunking Economics. Keen presents a wide variety of critiques on neoclassical economic theory, and argues that they show neoclassical assumptions are fundamentally flawed. Keen claims that several neoclassical assumptions are empirically unsupported (that is, they are unsupported by observable and repeatable phenomena) nor are they desirable for society at large (that is, they do not necessarily produce either efficiency or equity for the majority). He argues that economists' overall conclusions are very sensitive to small changes in these assumptions.

Keen has attempted to counter Marx's theory (in his view Marx's pre-1857 view, specifically) from a post-Keynesian perspective, by arguing that machines can add more product-value over their operational lifetime than the total value of depreciation charged during those asset lives. For example, the total value of sausages produced by a sausage machine over its useful life might be greater than the value of the machine. Depreciation, he implies, was the weak point in Marx's social accounting system all along. Similar to John Roemer, Keen argues that all factors of production can add new value to outputs.

Keen's book closes with a survey of various schools of heterodox economics, concluding "None of these is at present strong enough or complete enough to declare itself a contender for the title of ‘the’ economic theory of the 21st century." However, he argues that neoclassical economics is a degenerative research program, not generating new knowledge but growing a belt of protective auxiliary hypotheses to shield its core beliefs from critique. There is an accompanying web site which provides more detailed mathematical expositions.

Critique of neoclassical theory of the firm

Keen's work (as opposed to his popularization) has also focused on refuting the neoclassical theory of the firm, which argues that firms will set marginal revenue equal to marginal cost. Keen notes that empirical research finds real firms set price well above marginal cost: they charge a markup, often cost-plus pricing; compare fellow post-Keynesian Alfred Eichner, who also argued for markup pricing.

He cites Eiteman & Guthrie, finding 89% of firms set prices above the level where marginal revenue is equal to marginal cost, as well as more recent work by Alan Blinder.

Keen's article on "profit maximization, industry structure, and competition" has had counter-arguments by Paul Anglin.

Minsky software project

See Minsky (economic simulator)

Recently, Keen commissioned the development of a software package called Minsky for visually modelling national economies, in a way that is intended to be more accurate than mainstream macroeconomic models – which he contends do not properly include debt and banking. He envisages it being used for both educational and research purposes.

The first phase of the development was funded by an academic research grant, as is typical for academic research projects – but in February 2013 Keen launched a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter to allow members of the public to contribute towards taking MINSKY to the next level of development. In the first 24 hours, this project raised approximately 15% of its funding target, and has since fully achieved its initial funding goal of $50,000.00.

Criticisms

Some reviewers contend that Keen has not shown what he claims, that he misrepresents economic theory, and that he gets basic mathematics wrong.

Matthijs Krul maintains that Keen, while broadly accurate in his criticism of the neoclassical synthesis, generally misrepresents Marx's views in Debunking Economics and in earlier work when asserting that, in the production of commodities, machinery produces more value than it costs.

Austrian economists Robert P. Murphy and Gene Callahan, criticize Keen's 2001 book, by stating that the "work suffers from many of the very faults of which he accuses the mainstream". They also claim that much of his work is "ideologically motivated even while criticizing neoclassical economics for being ideological". They praise his critique of perfect competition, and his chapter on dynamic vs static models, whilst they criticize his attempts at objective value theory and what they claim is his misinterpretation of the Austrian interpretation of Say's law.

Other publications

• Lee, Frederic S. and Steve Keen (2004): "The Incoherent Emperor: A Heterodox Critique of Neoclassical Microeconomic Theory", Review of Social Economy, V. 62, Iss. 2: 169–199
• Co-editor of: Commerce, Complexity and Evolution: Topics in Economics, Finance, Marketing, and Management: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-62030-9.

See also

• Paul Ormerod

External links

• Steve Keen's Debtwatch blog
• Steve Keen (Twitter)
• List of Steve Keen's publications
• There is madness in their method A sample chapter from Debunking Economics.
• Steve Keen at Institute for New Economic Thinking
• A more detailed presentation of the contents in the Physica A article.
• A news feature on an Econophysics paper co-written by Prof. Keen appeared in the journal Nature, accompanied by an editorial.
• Interview conducted on 13 Dec 2009 by Dominic Frisby about Steve Keen's predictions for 2010
• Steven Keen 4 February 2010 (video from Switzer TV)
• Steve Keen interviewed on BBC's Hard Talk
• Steve Keen interviewed on RT's Capital Account (10 Nov 2011)
• Economics Editor Paul Mason interviews Steve Keen before an audience at the London School of Economics on BBC's Analysis (4 June 2012)
• Max Keiser interviews Steve Keen about the Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of dynamic modeling software for finance and economics (14 March 2013)
• Institute for New Economic Thinking conference in Hong Kong Slides and Video of panelist Steve Keen about "Economics and the Powerful: Faulty Analysis, Economic Advice, and the Imperatives of Power" (4 April 2013)