Debunking Economics - the podcast

Steve Keen believes the way we look at economics is wrong from the ground up. Take the demand curve, for example. It shows how, when prices fall demand goes up, and vice versa. Whilst it works at an individual level, but attempts by theoreticians to demonstrate that this works at the aggregate level have all failed. In this episode we look at the Sonnerschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, which looks at how price changes of one good will impact your consumption of that good and all others. The big failing, says Steve, is that they ignore the relationship between workers, capitalist and bankers. In this podcast we explain how the income distribution effect makes the demand curve much more complicated than the neoclassical economists would let on., to the point where the theory at its simplest level is worthless. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Post Brexit we were promised a global Britain. It’s got off to a bad start with a massive fall in exports to the EU in the first month of this new utopia. Meanwhile, there seems to be a lot of talk about Britain accepting inward investment, in particular encouraging foreign firms to list on the London stock exchange. This week Phil Dobbie discusses the various types of foreign trade, from inward to outward FDIs, corporate takeovers and UK share listings by foreign firms. Will any of these benefit the UK, and does the government actually have a plan?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The UK chose to respond to a global pandemic by reducing the amount of money given in foreign aid. Yet COVID-19 is attacking every country in the world. So is climate change. And there will be other viruses to come. For example, Ebola is reported to be out of control in West Africa right now. It is not as infectious as COVID-19, but its fatality rate is way higher (maybe as much as 50 percent). So, how does the west protect the developing world, and itself, through mass vaccinations. Can it fund the vaccines with money it creates. Could we adopt an approach where the pound, the dollar and the Euro fund local production facilities in developing nations, just as the Chinese Yuan is funding belt and road initiatives in many countries. Never before has there been a need for such global cooperation, but how do we fund it? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The UK won’t see an end to lockdown measures until July, but after that the hope of many is that the economy will bounce back quickly. The Bank of England governor has called it a coiled spring. Many are comparing it to the roaring twenties. Part of the reason for this optimism is the argument that many people in the country have saved money during the lockdown, because they haven’t been able to spend on shopping or on overseas holidays. The household savings ratio increased significantly last year. But the figures are misleading, says Prof Steve Keen, on this week’s Debunking Economics podcast. National account figures ignore the servicing of debt, so the gap between income and consumption appears greater than it is in reality. If there was an increase in household savings you’d expect a decrease in the amount of household debt – but that’s not happening, says Steve. There’s a danger that the UK government will assume a rapid recovery, and pull back on stimulus measures that we’ll discover are needed further down the track. All because they ignored the impact of debt. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Australians can no longer turn to Facebook for news. From today they have banned Aussies from posting links to news sites on their platform, or for Facebook users anywhere linking to Australian news content. Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg says these actions demonstrate that the big social media players wield too much power and control. Facebook has taken this stance because they don’t believe they should have to pay whenever anyone on Facebook chooses to link to an Australian news site. Who can blame them? So howshould new content be funded, and should we be concerned about the power of the major internet players? Phil Dobbie and Steve Keen don’t exactly see eye to eye on this. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 2019 Greta Thunberg spoke to politicians at the UN Climate Week, saying they were promoting fairy tales of eternal economic growth. The next year we saw GDP in advanced economies fall by around five percent. Was this a win for the green movement? James Strain, a Debunking Economics Podcast listener, suggested we talked about the need for de-growth. He said, “It seems to me that this is imperative to our transition to a more sustainable society, but it breaks so many long-held fundamentals in mainstream economics that it's hard to see how we would begin to make the transition.” Most attempts to transition to a green economy have been fairly piecemeal, and don’t acknowledge the need for a move to less consumption. There is an answer, though. Steve Keen wasn’t a supporter of carbon trading at the business level, but he reminds Phil Dobbie of his suggestion that countries allocated carbon points to individuals. If you wanted to use more then you’d have to buy points from somebody else. They discuss how it could work in practice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There was a bit of argy-bargy on the share markets in America last week, when a bunch of day traders set to take on Wall Street, particularly the hedge funds who were shorting stock on Gamestop, amongst others. Were the day traders the bad guys in this scenario? Did the retail traders know what they were getting themselves in for? In this episode Prof Steve Keen suggests maybe the Robin Hood retail platform should be considered the bad guys. A step in the direction would be to reduce speculation in the market not drawing more people into it, he says on this week’s podcast, not to mention the waste of brainpower that has been exerted on this while exercise! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Remember a time when central banks pretended to be independent, insulated from day-to-day politics? That had all but disappeared before COVID, but the pandemic was the final nail in the coffin of central bank independence. Instead, they have been colluding with governments to provide the mechanism to issue more public sector debt. Monetarism can’t resolve this crisis, so central banks’ usual tools are worthless. This week Phil Dobbie asks Prof Steve Keen whether this new arrangement, where the central banks and the treasury collude, is here to stay? If the government can use money creation to develop policies to build jobs and control inflation, what’s left for the central banks?   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Last weekend, Lord Sumption, was talking about why a lockdown harms everyone when the virus mainly ills people who are old or who have with debilitating conditions. He suggested we shouldn’t have lockdowns, because the lives lost were of less value than the rest of us. He isn’t the first to suggest that some lives are worth more than others. In fact, he argues we place a value on human life to determine the extent of healthcare intervention. It’s called the Value of Prevented Fatality (VPF). This week on the Debunking Economics podcast Phil Dobbie asks Prof Steve Keen whether we should consider the value of life in segments of society when developing policy on the pandemic. Some would see pensioners as a cost to society and, if you were being totally heartless, less of them would be a benefit to the economy. We look at just how flawed that thinking is. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One big problem as we emerge out of the COVID crisis is, even if we have money we’ll be reluctant to spend it. So, how can the government get us to step up our spending? The answer, perhaps, lies in Austria in the 1930s, when the Mayor of Wörgl issued his town’s own currency, with built in demurrage. Could a new, parallel currency be the way to increase the velocity of money and help the economy bounce back. Could it also be the first big step towards a universal basic income? Prof Steve Keen talks through the benefits with Phil Dobbie. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.