Menu Expand
Debunking Economics

Debunking Economics

Professor Steve Keen

(2011)

Additional Information

Book Details

Abstract

Debunking Economics exposes what many non-economists may have suspected and a minority of economists have long known: that economic theory is not only unpalatable, but also plain wrong. When the original Debunking was published back in 2001, the market economy seemed invincible, and conventional 'neoclassical' economic theory basked in the limelight. Steve Keen argued that economists deserved none of the credit for the economy's performance, and that 'the false confidence it has engendered in the stability of the market economy has encouraged policy-makers to dismantle some of the institutions which initially evolved to try to keep its instability within limits'. That instability exploded with the devastating financial crisis of 2007, and now haunts the global economy with the prospect of another Depression. In this radically updated and greatly expanded new edition, Keen builds on his scathing critique of conventional economic theory whilst explaining what mainstream economists cannot: why the crisis occurred, why it is proving to be intractable, and what needs to be done to end it. Essential for anyone who has ever doubted the advice or reasoning of economists, Debunking Economics provides a signpost to a better future.
'Economics still awaits its Darwin. Keynes came close, but not close enough. Keen comes closer still. Economics, like biology used to be, remains mostly faith-based. No book poses a bigger threat to that faith than the second and expanded edition of Debunking Economics.' - Edward Fullbrook, Editor, Real World Economics Review 'The new edition of 'Debunking Economics'... provide[s] a more persuasive account of the causes of the crash and of its likely evolution than anything that has yet emerged from Constitution Avenue or Threadneedle Street. This is complicated, but it's in your interests to understand it.' George Monbiot 'It is notorious that only the most mediocre students have the stomach to stick with graduate economics degree. The assumptions become so narrow-minded and tunnel-visioned that reality-based minds drop out. But economics obviously is important ­ too much so to be left to economists. Fortunately, Steve Keen is an empirical mathematician who views the economy logically and systematically. Having made a pioneering explanatory statistical model, he looked through the literature to review the history of economic thought ­ and saw how little today's assumptions had to contribute to Reality Economics. So his book does two things. First, it explains some of the most wrong-headed logical paths that led today's 'free market' economics down its detour to rationalize the status quo. Second, it explains how to view the economy from a more realistic, cause-and-effect light.' - Michael Hudson, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics, University of Missouri 'You would be hard-pressed to find an individual whose pre-crisis analyses of both the world financial system and the economics profession were more dead on than Steve Keen's. The original edition of this book not only demonstrated the irrelevance of modern theory, but it predicted the major economic and social crisis that occurred. This second edition updates earlier chapters and adds new ones that directly address the causes of the collapse and the reasons why standard solutions have been useless. This book is an absolute must read for anyone wondering what caused this catastrophe and how we can truly put it behind us.' - Prof. John T. Harvey, author of 'Currencies, Capital Flows, and Crises: A Post Keynesian Analysis of Exchange Rate Determination' 'Redemption is this book's greatest gift to a world that grew dependent on the thinly disguised forms of mathematised superstition which, over the past thirty years, managed to dominate economic theory and policy. Keen's book is a tour de force that grants its reader the chance of immunity from these, still dominant, economic superstitions.' - Yanis Varoufakis, Professor of Economics, Athens University 'Professor Keen has written a book that will shake the economics community to its core, and for good reason. It could not have been written at a better time.' - Andrew Leeming, author of The Super Analysts 'Much more than simply explaining the causes of the crisis, Keen takes us through a thorough dissection of mainstream neoclassical economics, and the result does not leave the discipline looking in good shape.' - Tanweer Ali, Empire State College, State University of New York, in Heterodox Economics Newsletter
Steve Keen is Associate Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney. Steve predicted the financial crisis as long ago as December 2005, and warned that back in 1995 that a period of apparent stability could merely be 'the calm before the storm'. His leading role as one of the tiny minority of economists to both foresee the crisis and warn of it was recognised by his peers when he received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review for being the economist who most cogently warned of the crisis, and whose work is most likely to prevent future crises.

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
About the author i
Tables, figures and boxes vi
Tables vi
2.1 Anticipations of the housing crisis and recession 13
3.1 ‘Utils’ and change in utils from consuming bananas 43
3.2 Utils arising from the consumption of two commodities 44
3.3 The commodities in Sippel’s ‘Revealed Preference’ experiment 69
4.1 Demand schedule for a hypothetical monopoly 80
4.2 Costs for a hypothetical monopoly 82
4.3 Sales and costs determine the level of output that maximizes profit 84
4.4 Cost and revenue for a ‘perfectly competitive’ industry identical in scale to hypothetical monopoly 88
5.1 Input and output data for a hypothetical firm 106
5.2 Cost drawings for the survey by Eiteman and Guthrie 124
5.3 Empirical research on the nature of cost curves 126
7.1 Sraffa’s hypothetical subsistence economy 149
7.2 Production with a surplus 150
7.3 Relationship between maximum and actual rate of profit and the wage share of surplus 151
7.4 The impact of the rate of profit on the measurement of capital 153
10.1 Anderson’s ranking of sciences 208
12.1 The alleged Money Multiplier process 307
13.1 A hypothetical example of the impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 338
13.2 The actual impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 340
14.1 A pure credit economy with paper money 364
14.2 The dynamics of a pure credit economy with no growth 365
14.3 Net incomes 366
14.4 A growing pure credit economy with electronic money 371
15.1 Von Neumann’s procedure for working out a numerical value for utility 382
15.2 The Allais ‘Paradox’ 383
15.3 The Allais ‘Paradox’ Part 2 384
16.1 The solvability of mathematical models 409
17.1 Marx’s unadjusted value creation table, with the rate of profit dependent upon the variable-to-constant ratio in each sector 425
17.2 Marx’s profit distribution table, with the rate of profit now uniform across sectors 425
17.3 Steedman’s hypothetical economy 426
17.4 Steedman’s physical table in Marx’s value terms 427
17.5 Steedman’s prices table in Marx’s terms 428
17.6 Profit rate and prices calculated directly from output/wage data 429
17.7 Marx’s example where the use-value of machinery exceeds its depreciation 439
Figures vii
Where are the Diagrams? ix
Preface to the Second Edition x
Looking back xii
Looking forward xiii
Preface to the First Edition xiv
1 | Predicting the ‘unpredictable’ 1
The destabilizing effect of neoclassical economics 1
Possibility of debt deflation in the USA 2
The likelihood of a Japanese outcome for America after the crash 2
The impact of the Maastricht Treaty on Europe during a crisis 2
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis encouraging debt-financed speculation 3
Deregulation and crisis 3
The history of crises causing – and not causing – paradigm shifts in economics 4
Public reactions to the failure of neoclassical economics 5
Postscript 2011 6
2 | No more Mr Nice Guy 7
Why economics must undergo a long-overdue intellectual revolution 7
Purge 8
Triumph 9
Crisis 10
‘No one saw this coming’ 12
table 2.1 Anticipations of the housing crisis and recession 13
Revisionism 15
Ignorance 18
Educated into ignorance 19
Does economics matter? 22
Revolt 23
But it seems to make sense … 24
Sincerity is no defense 24
Debunking economics: a user’s guide 25
Part 1 | Foundations: The logical flaws in the key concepts of conventional economics 37
3 | The calculus of hedonism 38
Why the market demand curve is not downward-sloping 38
The kernel 38
The roadmap 39
Pleasure and pain 40
Flaws in the glass 41
‘The sum of the interests’ 43
table 3.1 ‘Utils’ and change in utils from consuming bananas 43
table 3.2 Utils arising from the consumption of two commodities 44
Deriving the individual demand curve 46
The impact of changing prices on consumer demand 47
Income and substitution effects and the ‘Law of Demand’ 48
How rising income affects demand 50
Two is a crowd 51
3.1 A valid market demand curve 52
Cut off at Pythagoras’ pass 53
Drowning the result 56
Don’t tell the children 57
Following the madding crowd 63
So what? 65
Addendum: an anti-empirical theory 67
table 3.3 The commodities in Sippel’s ‘Revealed Preference’ experiment 69
Rational behavior and the curse of dimensionality 70
Conclusion 72
4 | Size does matter 74
Why there is no supply curve 74
4.1 Leijonhufvud’s ‘Totems’ of the Econ tribe 74
The kernel 75
Prelude: the War over Perfect Competition 76
4.2 Stigler’s proof that the horizontal firm demand curve is a fallacy 76
The roadmap 78
Economic perfection 78
Monopoly 79
table 4.1 Demand schedule for a hypothetical monopoly 80
table 4.2 Costs for a hypothetical monopoly 82
table 4.3 Sales and costs determine the level of output that maximizes profit 84
Perfect competition 85
Checking our sums 87
Calculus 101 for economists: infinitesmals ain’t zero 87
table 4.4 Cost and revenue for a ‘perfectly competitive’ industry identical in scale to hypothetical monopoly 88
Returns to scale and the durability of perfect competition 93
Addendum: the war over perfect competition 95
Equating marginal cost and marginal revenue does not maximize profits 96
Calculus schmalculus 98
4.3 Output levels for between 1- and 100-firm industries 100
Dialogue with the deaf 100
So what? 101
5 | The price of everything and the value of nothing 103
Why most products cost less to produce as output rises 103
The kernel 103
The roadmap 104
Diminishing productivity causes rising price 104
table 5.1 Input and output data for a hypothetical firm 106
Things don’t add up 108
5.1 Capacity utilization over time in the USA 114
Resource-constrained versus demand-constrained economies 114
Summing up Sraffa 115
If not rising marginal cost, what? 116
So what? 118
The neoclassical rejoinder 120
Time and the short run 121
table 5.2 Cost drawings for the survey by Eiteman and Guthrie 124
Wrong in fact as well as theory 125
5.2 Varian’s drawing of cost curves in his ‘advanced’ microeconomics textbook 126
7.1 The standard economic ‘circular flow’ diagram 144
table 5.3 Empirical research on the nature of cost curves 126
A totem in tatters 127
6 | To each according to his contribution 129
Why productivity doesn’t determine wages 129
The kernel 129
The roadmap 130
Labor demand and supply: an inverted commodity 130
Marginal workers 131
Aggregate demand 131
Indifferent workers 132
Problems 133
Backward-bending supply curves 133
Monopoly and monopsony 135
Sraffa’s observations on aggregation 136
Freedom and labor 136
A three-horse race 137
‘A benevolent central authority’ 138
So what? 139
Part 2 | Complexities: Issues omitted from standard courses that should be part of an education in economics 141
7 | The holy war over capital 142
Why the productivity of capital doesn’t determine profits 142
The kernel 142
The roadmap 143
Measuring capital 143
7.1 The standard economic‘circular flow’ diagram 144
The whole box and dice 148
table 7.1 Sraffa’s hypothetical subsistence economy 149
table 7.2 Production with a surplus 150
table 7.3 Relationship between maximum and actual rate of profit and the wage share of surplus 151
The punchline: capital behaving badly 152
table 7.4 The impact of the rate of profit on the measurement of capital 153
So what? 157
Ignorance is bliss 157
8 | There is madness in their method 158
Why assumptions do matter, and why economics is so different from the true sciences 158
The kernel 158
The roadmap 159
A paradoxical proposition 159
9 | Let’s do the Time Warp again 175
Why economics must finally treat time seriously 175
The kernel 176
The roadmap 176
Cobwebs of the mind 176
General equilibrium 177
‘The formal identity of uncertainty with certainty’ 181
A transitional methodology? 184
In the long run, we are all in the short run 189
9.1 The time path of one variable in the Lorenz model 190
9.2 Structure behind the chaos 191
From meteorology to economics 192
Addendum: Misunderstanding Bill Phillips, wages and ‘the Phillips Curve’ 195
9.3 Phillips’s functional flow block diagram model of the economy 196
9.4 The component of Phillips’s Figure 12 including the role of expectations in price setting 197
9.5 Phillips’s hand drawing of the output–price-change relationship 197
9.6 A modern flow-chart simulation program generating cycles, not equilibrium 198
9.7 Phillips’s empirically derived unemployment–money-wage-change relation 199
10 | Why they didn’t see it coming 203
Why the world’s leading macroeconomists were the last ones capable of realizing that a major economic crisis was imminent 203
The kernel 204
The roadmap 204
Macroeconomics and the reductionist fallacy 205
table 10.1 Anderson’s ranking of sciences 208
Say, Walras, and the self-equilibrating economy … 209
Credit and the fallacy of Walras’s Law 218
Walrasian rejoinders? 221
So what? 223
Hamlet without the prince 225
10.1 Hicks’s model of Keynes 231
10.2 Unemployment-inflation data in the USA, 1960–70 241
The age of large-scale econometric models 237
From IS-LM to the representative agent 239
10.2 Unemployment inflation data in the USA, 1960–70 241
10.3 The hog cycle 248
Conclusion 266
Box 10.1 The Taylor Rule 267
Postscript: intellectual miasma or corporate corruption? 268
11 | The price is not right 270
Why finance markets can get the price of assets so badly wrong 270
The kernel 271
The roadmap 272
Fisher on finance: from reassuring oracle to ignored Cassandra 272
Fisher during the Crash: ‘don’t panic’ 277
The efficient markets hypothesis 282
11.1 How the EMH imagines that investors behave 288
11.2 How speculators actually behave 293
12.1 Change in M0 and unemployment, 1920–40 303
Addendum: Fama overboard 294
So wrong it’s almost right 295
12 | Misunderstanding the Great Depression and the Great Recession 297
12.1 Change in M0 and unemployment,1920–40 303
After the Great Recession: Bernanke to the rescue? 304
12.2 The volume of base money in Bernanke’s ‘quantitative easing’ in historical perspective 306
The mythical Money Multiplier 306
Table 12.1 The alleged Money Multiplier process 307
12.3 The empirical ‘Money Multiplier’, 1920–40 311
Don’t mention the data 312
After the Great Recession II: neoclassical responses 314
It’s just a jolt to the left … 315
‘Like a dog walking on its hind legs’: Krugman’s Minsky model 318
Conclusion: neat, plausible, and wrong 323
Part 3 | Alternatives: different ways to think about economics 325
13 | Why I did see ‘It’ coming 326
The Financial Instability Hypothesis 326
Modeling Minsky 331
13.1 The vortex of debt in my 1995 Minsky model 334
Reality check, December 2005 336
13.2 US private debt to GDP, 1955–2005 336
The empirical dynamics of debt 337
Table 13.1 A hypothetical example of the impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 338
13.3 Aggregate demand in the USA, 1965–2015 340
Table 13.2 The actual impact of decelerating debt on aggregate demand 340
13.4 The change in debt collapses as the Great Recession begins 341
13.5 The Dow Jones nosedives 342
13.6 The housing bubble bursts 342
13.7 The Credit Impulse and change in employment 343
Box 13.1 Definitions of unemployment 344
13.8 The biggest collapse in the Credit Impulse ever recorded 348
13.9 The two great debt bubbles 349
Debt deflation then and now 349
13.10 The collapse of debt-financed demand then and now 352
Fighting the Great Recession 353
Conclusion 356
14 | A Monetary Model of Capitalism 357
Methodological precepts 358
Endogenous money 358
14.1 The neoclassical model of exchange as barter 361
14.2 The nature of exchange in the real world 361
A ‘pure credit’ economy 362
Table 14.1 A pure credit economy with paper money 364
Table 14.2 The dynamics of a pure credit economy with no growth 365
Table 14.3 Net incomes 366
14.3 Bank accounts 367
A credit crunch 368
Whose bailout works best? 369
A modern credit crunch 370
Table 14.4 A growing pure credit economy with electronic money 371
14.4 Unemployment is better with a debtor bailout 373
From tranquility to breakdown 374
14.5 Modeling the Great Moderation and the Great Recession – inflation, unemployment and debt 374
14.6 The Great Moderation and the Great Recession – actual inflation, unemployment and debt 375
14.7 Debt and GDP in the model 376
14.8 Debt and GDP during the Great Depression 376
Making monetary modeling accessible: QED 376
Conclusion 377
15 | Why stock markets crash 378
The kernel 378
The roadmap 378
Behavioral finance 378
Table 15.1 Von Neumann’s procedure for working out a numerical value for utility Consumer: Joan Cheng 382
Table 15.2 The Allais ‘Paradox’: Experiment 1 383
Table 15.3 The Allais ‘Paradox’ Part 2: Experiment 2 384
The inherent instability of stock markets 385
The Fractal Markets Hypothesis 386
The Inefficient Markets Hypothesis 389
Econophysics 390
Conclusion: progress versus ossification 393
Reforming finance? 393
Conclusion 400
16 | Don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano 402
Why mathematics is not the problem 402
The kernel 402
The roadmap 403
Bad mathematics 403
Omitted variables 405
False equalities 406
Unexplored conditions 406
The limits to mathematics 407
Table 16.1 The solvability of mathematical models 409
The recurring nightmare of straight lines 410
The future of mathematics in economics 411
17 | Nothing to lose but their minds 412
Why most Marxists are irrelevant, but most of Marx is not 412
The kernel 412
The roadmap 413
Marxian economics and the economics of Marx 413
Value – a prelude 414
Physiocrats 416
Smith (and Ricardo) 417
Marx’s labor theory of value 420
The origin of surplus value (I) 422
Table 17.1 Marx’s unadjusted value creation table, with the rate of profit dependent upon the variable-to-constant ratio in each sector 425
Table 17.2 Marx’s profit distribution table, with the rate of profit now uniform across sectors 425
Marxist economics after Sraffa 426
Table 17.3 Steedman’s hypothetical economy 426
Table 17.4 Steedman’s physical table in Marx’s value terms 427
Table 17.5 Steedman’s prices table in Marx’s terms 428
Table 17.6 Profit rate and prices calculated directly from output/wage data 429
Arun Bose: Marx’s ‘capital axioms’ 431
The origin of surplus value (II) 432
17.1 A graphical representation of Marx’s dialectics 433
Boxes viii
10.1 The Taylor Rule 267
13.1 Definitions of unemployment 344
The origin of surplus value (II) 438
Table 17.7 Marx’s example where the use-value of machinery exceeds its depreciation 439
Marx without the labor theory of value 439
The misinterpretation of Marx 440
Whither Marxism? 442
18 | There are alternatives 444
Why there is still hope for a better economics 444
Austrian economics 445
Post-Keynesian economics 449
Sraffian economics 450
Complexity theory and Econophysics 452
Evolutionary economics 454
W(h)ither economics? 456
Bibliography 461
Index 472