Steve Keen

He has described himself as one of the key students whose 1973 protests at Sydney University, the “Political Economy dispute,” led to the formation of the university’s Department of Political Economy in 1975, and has said those events transformed his life.⁠[1]

He received a BA from Sydney University in 1974 and an LLB there in 1976, a Diploma of Education from Sydney Teachers’ College in 1977, and a Master of Commerce with honours in economics and economic history from the University of New South Wales in 1990.⁠[2]

Before academia he worked as a school librarian, an education officer for an NGO, a conference organiser, a computer programmer and a journalist for the computer press, and was an economic commentator for ABCABCABC (American Broadcasting Company) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It grew out of NBC’s Blue radio network, took its name after becoming independent in 1943, developed into a national television network after merging with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, was acquired by Capital Cities in 1985, and has been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. With CBS and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks, and it is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry Radio.⁠[3]

From 1996 to 2013 he taught at the University of Western Sydney, and in 1998 he received a PhD in economics from the University of New South Wales.⁠[4]

In 2001 Zed in London published his 352-page Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences, which critiques neoclassical theories of consumer demand, the firm and the labour market from first principles, also critiques Marxist economics, and surveys alternatives such as Austrian, Post-Keynesian and complexity economics.⁠[5]

His author profile says he publicly warned from as early as December 2005 that a serious economic crisis was coming.⁠[4]

Early in the financial crisis he predicted a 40% fall in Australian house prices, and Macquarie Bank economist Rory Robertson bet that he would have to walk from Canberra to Mount Kosciuszko if prices fell by less than half that; prices fell just 5.5% before rising, and in April 2010 he completed the 225-kilometre trek in nine days wearing a T-shirt reading “I was hopelessly wrong on house prices,” raising money for the homeless.⁠[6]

On May 13, 2010, the Real-World Economics Review announced that he had won the Revere Award for Economics as the economist judged to have first and most cogently warned of the global financial crisis; more than 2,500 people voted, he received more than twice as many votes as his nearest rival, and Nouriel Roubini and Dean Baker placed second and third.⁠[7]

He led the Institute for New Economic Thinking project “Extending Macroeconomics and Developing a Dynamic Monetary Simulation Tool”; the institute noted that a second edition of Debunking Economics was due in September 2011.⁠[3]

In March 2012 Paul KrugmanPaul KrugmanPaul Krugman is an economist who was the sole winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on new trade theory and economic geography; after teaching at Yale, MIT, Stanford and Princeton he has been a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center since 2015. He wrote a New York Times column from 2000 to 2024 and has since written mainly on Substack; he appeared on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2020.Open the full entry questioned, on his New York Times blog, Keen’s argument that new lending adds to aggregate demand, writing “I guess I don’t get that at all”; Keen, who argues that banks create credit, kept responding for nearly two years and published a concluding reply on openDemocracy in February 2014.⁠[8]

From July 2014 to November 2018 he was professor of economics at Kingston University in the United Kingdom, and from July 2014 to January 2016 he was also head of its School of Economics, History and Politics.⁠[2]

Since 2018 he has been an honorary professor at University College London.⁠[4]

He is also a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Institute for Strategy, Resilience & Security.⁠[9]

In September 2020 he published “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change,” arguing that economists’ forecasts of climate damage were far more sanguine than scientists’ warnings, saying that William Nordhaus had misrepresented the scientific literature and arguing that corrected damages could be at least an order of magnitude worse.⁠[10]

In 2021 he published The New Economics: A Manifesto, in which he calls neoclassical economics an “existential threat” to capitalism and human civilisation; reviewers Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan summarised its three focuses as the role of money, credit and debt in the macroeconomy, the economy’s nonlinear dynamics, and the economics of climate change.⁠[11]

On July 17, 2022, he appeared as a heterodox economist and author on episode 303 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, titled “Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics,” covering schools of economics, Karl Marx and the labour theory of value, socialism, the Soviet Union, China, climate change, Minsky’s model, the financial crisis and inflation.⁠[12]

On October 13, 2022, Trier University of Applied Sciences’ Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld awarded him the Friede Gard Prize, recognising his translation of Minsky’s “Financial Instability Hypothesis” into a mathematical model and his creation of the system dynamics software MINSKY; alongside the ceremony he gave a workshop on using MINSKY.⁠[13]

Personal website: Public link: https://profstevekeen.substack.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/profstevekeen (opens in a new window)⁠[12]