Steve Keen

So they basically remain insulated from the rest of the academic disciplines and in a little fantasy world where equilibrium applies.

And that becomes what they think is the real world.

And they end up being zealots for their vision of the economy rather than analysts as people think they are.

I actually find Nobel Prize winners saying much the same thing.

So a guy got the Nobel Prize – and it's not a Nobel Prize, by the way, for those who don't know.

Nobel Prize did not include economics and actually specifically said he wouldn't because he didn't regard it as a science.

It was an invention of the Swedish Central Bank in 1969, and it was invented as part of a battle they were having against social democratic policies in Sweden at the time.

And that basically was there to enhance what they call market-oriented thinking, basically the neoclassical model over the rival approaches.

So anyway, so one of the guys they gave a Nobel Prize to was Paul Romer.

And Paul Romer wrote a paper called The Trouble with Macroeconomics.

And he said that from his point of view, economics had gone backwards for the previous 30 years.

So everything between 1980 and 2016, roughly when he got the prize, or 2018, he's saying was a backward step.

So it's not just Richard who's saying that sort of thing.

It's people who have been given Nobel Prizes in economics who feel the same way.

It's interesting.

I mean, I have a finance background.

Finance is just a branch of neoclassical economics.

And like the whole efficient markets hypothesis, that's another example of the nonsense that neoclassical economists will continue promulgating, even when they themselves have said it doesn't work.

So there's probably, I don't know that you would know about this paper, but you know the names Fama and French?

Yeah.