In lieu of not getting the mechanics of this organized in time to send copies out with the launch, I am going to send everyone a signed physical copy of the book. eBooks are too new for sending of those to be feasible except in the USA–and the eBook isn’t available yet anyway. The signature is by way of recompense for not getting delivery together in time.

Hopefully the funds being raised on by the Centre will ultimately allow me to hire clerical staff so that this–and many other such tasks–can be taken out of my hands and I can then focus on research and writing.

The books are being sent out from Zed Books UK, and for this we need your physical address (the membership plugin doesn’t enable us to collect that information when you sign up unfortunately).

So if you are a member at the requisite level (Fellow or Partner), please send your address details to:

Ruben Moopoosamy
ruben@zedbooks.net

Please also copy the information to me.

The books will be sent out by airmail–in which case, US supporters should receive their copies before the book is available in bookstores there.

It’s time to put money into the equation, says professor

This link to the video on the SMH website is below:

http://media.smh.com.au/system/ipad/new-economics-2614470.html

For the convenience of overseas readers, I’ve reproduced the story and the video below

It’s time to put money into the equation, says professor

(Story by Gareth Hutchens)

THE global financial crisis, the latest episode of which boiled over last week, did more than destroy wealth and jobs, or embarrass the rating agencies.

It exposed the malaise within the economics profession and the deep flaws in its orthodox theories.

George Soros, the billionaire financier and philanthropist, was among those who joined the search for new ideas.

Mr Soros funded a new organisation called the Institute for New Economic Thinking which for the past two years has handed out millions of dollars in grants, funding research projects that look at economics in fresh ways.

This month, the institute gave more than $125,000 to an Australian. (However I’m neither the only nor the first Australian to get an INET Grant: Leanne Ussher, who is now an  Assistant Professor of Economics at Queens College, City University of New York, received a grant in INET’s first round to study of how distress and growth propagate through the real economy via a network of inter-firm trade credit)

Steve Keen, Associate Professor of Economics and Finance at the University of Western Sydney, has won a grant to turn his money-based model of the macro-economy – which draws on the theories of economists such as Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes – into a computer program for students and economists.

INET grant recipients already include Barry Eichengreen, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Doyne Farmer, a physicist and professor at the Santa Fe Institute.

Professor Eichengreen is using the grant to “ramp up” production of economists with an understanding of history who can contribute to public policy debates. Professor Farmer plans to build a “computational model” of the financial crisis.

Professor Keen says his program will make it easy to develop “dynamic” models of the economy that incorporate money and debt – something that orthodox models do not do.

“[About] 99 per cent of economic models assume money doesn’t exist. They assume you live in a barter system … That’s why they didn’t see the financial crisis coming,” he said.

“I’ve worked to find if I can build a truly monetary model of capitalism … [and] this is probably the only dynamic monetary model ever produced.”

Professor Keen says the public would be stunned to learn that most economists use models that ignore money.

“You must have the monetary dynamics of capitalism properly incorporated to understand capitalism properly, so my model starts with banks’ loans and goes from there.”

The point of the program will be to encourage economists to build economic models that account for the volatile nature of money, Professor Keen says.

The program will be given to students free.

Last year, Professor Keen had to walk from Canberra to Mount Kosciuszko after losing a bet with Rory Robertson, the then interest rate strategist for Macquarie Bank.

Professor Keen had bet in 2008 that Australian house prices would lose 40 per cent in value in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/its-time-to-put-money-into-the-equation-says-professor-20110925-1krt2.html#ixzz1Z2plszPA

President (I am applying for this position of course)

Vice President
Secretary

Treasurer

Member (3 positions to be filled)

If you would like to nominate, please post a comment to that effect here. Then I need one other member to support the nomination, which can be done by sending a comment to the effect that “I, X, support the nomination of Y, for position Z on the Committee”.
Sorry for the haste–as usual too much to do and I’m running one day behind what the constitution requires here. But I hope we’ll be forgiven on the first AGM!

Cheers, Steve

One year later, that optimism is evaporating around the world, in the face of persistent bad news. Economic growth in America, Europe and Australia is anemic, unemployment is rising, and stock markets have gone from a sustained rally back into near Bear Market territory.

Meanwhile, the neoclassical economists who didn’t see the coming have nonetheless remained in charge of economic policy, and still overwhelmingly dominate the academic profession. Having failed to anticipate the crisis, they are now failing to overcome it. Clearly, if we leave the economics establishment to its own devices, it will continue to espouse failed theories, and apply failed remedies. If change is to come to economics, then it has to come from outside the mainstream of the academic profession, and outside the traditional bastions of economic policy.

That is the objective of CfESI. It has operated with minimal funds in the last year–predominantly donations from readers of Steve Keen’s Debtwatch blog. If it is to be effective, it has to have substantially more funding than can be raised by donations alone, and it needs more than just the time that volunteers can give.

For these reasons, we are now using the first AGM of the CfESI to attempt to generate a substantial membership base that can fund several important activities:

• Hire a research assistant to maintain the economic database that lies behind the empirical analysis of debt-deflation published on the Debtwatch blog;
• Support the development of Minsky, a new software package for modelling the monetary dynamics of capitalism;
• Enable policy papers based on the Financial Instability Hypothesis to be developed and widely promulgated.

So please sign up to CfESI, and if you can, come along to the AGM:

• Date: Wednesday September 7th 2011
• Time: From 6pm-9pm
• Place: At The Sydney Mechanics School of Arts (1st floor), 280 Pitt Street, Sydney NSW 2000

I hope to see you there.

Cheers, Steve Keen