Steve Keen Quotes

If a 19th century capitalist Machiavelli had wished to cripple the socialist intelligentsia of the 20th century, he could have invented no more cogent weapon than the labour theory of value. Yet this theory was the invention, not of a defender of capitalism, but of its greatest critic: Karl Marx.

If there was never any difference between the value of commodities someone desired to sell and buy on the market, then no-one would ever desire to accumulate wealth. But an essential feature of capitalism is the existence of a group of agents with precisely that intention.

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.

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

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

The obsession with equilibrium has imposed enormous costs on economics.

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

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.

This ascendancy of economic theory has not made the world a better place. Instead, it has made an already troubled society worse: more unequal, more unstable, and less 'efficient'.

Though mainstream economics began by assuming that his hedonistic, individualistic approach to analysing consumer demand was intellectually sound, it ended up proving that it was not.

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

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.

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

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

If financial markets aren't efficient, then what are they? According to the 'fractal market hypothesis', they are highly unstable dynamic systems that generate stock prices which appear random, but behind which lie deterministic patterns.