PSA: Steve Keen at the Roosevelt in NYC tonight at 5:00/6:00

Talk is called “Neat, Plausible, and Wrong: the Deluded Discipline of Economics.”

I have to quibble with the “plausible” portion: there is no possible way to rationalize contemporary Microeconomics with any reasonable conceit that the Macroeconomics produced are “first-best” or anything similar.*

I doubt I’ll be there at 5:00, but certainly by 6:00. Hope to see some of you there.

Any questions for Professor Keen can be emailed to me or put in comments.

*This may be the root of my disagreement with Brad DeLong, who learned Macro and Micro when it was still possible—barely—to envision a GUT of Economics, even in a (weak form, as it were) Arrow-Debreu world. In the past thirty years, the strange delusion that Arrow-Debreu actually reflects the world has come to dominant Micro—with the rather predictable adverse consequence that Macro has to be more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts—i.e., include a positive social aspect—to be the best of all posible current worlds. But a positive social aspect is not part of the NeoKeynesian** cant, so you end up, effectively, declaring (for instance) that Gary Becker is wrong and discrimination is a beneficial business practice.

**As I have noted before, in economics the phrase “neo” is added to the front of a word if you are putting forth a belief set that is diametrically opposed to what came before: neoClassical and neoKeynesian are the most obvious examples of this.