Minsky and Me and Steve Keen on The Turning Point – 1966

Steve Keen is a dissident economist who seems to have the large perspective that I like, although I myself do not fully understand the details of his discussions.

Steve Keen

He contends that mainstream economics does not understand what money is. That just rings so true to me. One of my colleagues, an economist, told me candidly many decades ago that economists do not know what a dollar is. It seems incredible but it fits with everything I know about symbolic interaction.

Steve Keen was one of the very few economists who foresaw the 2007 collapse.

Here is another matter that I have thought about for over forty years, which he mentions in his classic, 2011 book, Debunking Economics –Revised and Expanded Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?He writes on p.339: 

“Minsky himself identified 1966 as the time at which America made the transition from a productive to a Ponzi economy.”

Nineteen sixty-six was the point at which the US decided it was all right to kill people in Viet-Nam even though everyone could see that there was no valid reason for it, that the war was false and unjustified. Even children knew it was wrong. It was a conscious decision by the country that what it did in Viet-Nam was justifiable, that the war was legitimate, that murder was acceptable. The Senate walls dripped with blood, said George McGovern, and the electorate showed him what they thought of his truth speaking – he lost every state (except Massachusetts) to Richard Nixon, an obvious criminal.

I remember 1966 very well. Viet-Nam, the USA’s invasion of Viet-Nam, was the big question, and the nation’s refusal to stop doing it, after everyone, including the government, knew it was immoral, was the disconnect point from any attempt to be true and good. That was the breaking point for the US – socially, morally, economically.

Chicago Democratic Convention in 1966

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in 1966

What Minsky and Keen are saying is that 1966 was the point at which we overtly shifted from a productive economy to a Ponzi economy, and what I say is that it was also the point at which the USA overtly became selfish, irredeemable, consciously criminal. After 1966, and particularly after the events at the Democratic National Convention that year, it became openly understood and acknowledged that the USA is a murderer and no one is going to do anything about it.

I read recently an elite academic who referred to “the carefree ‘sixties.” That’s a good indication of how far the country is lost.

Steve Keen does not talk about Viet-Nam specifically, as far as I know, but there are many good clips on YouTube in which he talks of what has been going on economically since then, and what he sees in the future. Here is a relatively short and understandable interview: