Skip to content

Steve Keen Quotes

born 1953 Australia

Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is a professor in economics and finance at the University of Western Sydney. His recent work mostly concentrates on mathematical modeling and simulation of financial instability.

Australia
Academics
Economists
Non-fiction authors

Random Steve Keen quote

26 quotes

Economics is not the Emperor of the social sciences, but the Humpty Dumpty.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

The belief that a capitalist economy is inherently stabilising is also one for which inhabitants of market economies may pay dearly in the future.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Why do economists persist in modelling the economy with static tools when dynamic ones exist; why do they treat as stationery an entity which is forever changing?

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Economic theory in general ignores processes which take time to occur, and instead assumes that everything occurs in equilibrium.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Not even an economist can make time stand still (though some victims of economics lectures might dispute that!).

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

The term 'capital' has two quite different meanings in economics: a sum of money, and a collection of machinery.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

The position I favor is that economics is a science, but a rather pathological one.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

The obsession with equilibrium has imposed enormous costs on economics.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Which comes first — price being set by the intersection of supply and demand, or individual firms equating marginal cost to price?

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

In general then, and contrary to Friedman, abandoning a factually false heuristic asumption will normally lead to a better theory — not a worse one.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

If values are fairly evenly distributed around an average, then roughly two-thirds of all outcomes will be one standard deviation other side of the average.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

There are numerous theorems in economics that rely upon mathematically fallacious propositions.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Rather like the Bible is for many Christians, the General Theory is the essential economics reference which few economists have ever read.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Even economists can't escape the fact that, as commodities go, labour is something out of the ordinary.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

You have a voice, which has been perhaps been quiescent on matters economic because you have in the past deferred to the authority of the economist. There is no reason to remain quiet.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

The EMH cannot apply in a world in which investors differ in their expectations, in which the future is uncertain, and in which borrowing is rationed.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Trusting souls who accept economic assurances that markets are efficient are unlikely to fare any better this time when the Bull gives way to the Bear.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

If investors disagree about future prospects of companies, then inevitably the future is not going to turn out as most — or perhaps even any — investors expect.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Since in reality the stock market is inhabited by mere mortals, there is no way that the stock market can be efficient in the way that economists define the term.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Thus while diminishing returns do exist when industries are broadly defined, no industry can be considered in isolation from all the others, as supply and demand curve analysis requires.

Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Steve Keen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.