Steve Keen

Steve Keen is a Distinguished Research Fellow at UCL, the author of The New Economics: A Manifesto (2021), Debunking Economics (2011) and Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? (2017), and one of the few economists to anticipate the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, for which he received the Revere Award from the Real World Economics Review.

His main research interests are the complex systems approach to macroeconomics, and the economics of climate change. He has over 80 refereed publications on financial instability, money creation, logical and mathematical flaws in conventional and Marxian economic theory, the role of energy in production, and many other topics. He is ranked in 19th in Academic Influence’s list of influential economists. This is his Google Scholar site.

He designed the Open-Source system dynamics program Minsky, which is the first program to allow monetary economic models to be designed visually. He is about to release a commercial business intelligence program built on top of Minsky called Ravel©™.

He has previously been Professor of Economics at Kingston University London and the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

He is active on Twitter as @ProfSteveKeen, and is crowdfunding his non-mainstream research into economics via Patreon and Substack. He is now offering a set of “Mastermind” lectures via the site www.stevekeenfree.com.

California dry lakebed

The Economics of COPOUT28

Either we stop global warming, or global warming stops us. “Sustainable socioeconomic development” is no longer on the menu.

January 5, 2024

Roman slaves

The Great Simplification: Steve Keen “Mythonomics”

Keen discusses how mainstream economics misses the centrality of energy to our economy and to our futures, the naive treatment to the risks of money and debt creation, and the disconnect economic theory has to climate change risks.

August 4, 2022

climate change

Nobel prize-winning economics of climate change is misleading and dangerous – here’s why

Nordhaus (and about 20 like-minded economists) used two main methods to derive sanguine estimates of the economic consequences of climate change: the “enumerative method” and the “statistical method”. But my research shows neither stand up to scrutiny.

September 10, 2020

Economics in the Post-Neoclassical Era

One reason that the Neoclassical School is so resilient to criticism is that it has a theory of value that provides its believers with a frame of reference that is both a core set of beliefs, and a means to generate coherent arguments across a wide range of topics. Post Keynesians deliberately eschewed that, and I think this is one reason they failed.

May 16, 2017

The Role of Energy in Production

Economic theory has failed to incorporate the role of energy in production for two centuries since the Physiocrats. In this video I derive a production function that includes energy in an essential manner. It implies that economic growth has been driven by the increase in the energy throughput capabilities of machinery.

April 17, 2017