Steve Keen Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

What makes economics different from and inferior to other sciences is the tenacity with which it holds to its core beliefs in the face of either contrary factual evidence or theoretical critiques that establish fundamental inconsistencies in its intellectual apparatus.'''

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

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.

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

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.

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

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