Steve Keen's Lectures on Economics and Finance

If you are new to economics―or my approach to it―then I suggest you start with the History of Economic Thought lectures, and/or the Managerial Economics lectures, which evaluate conventional economics against the empirical data.

All lectures are in Powerpoint format (which Linux users can now access using OpenOffice.org), and quite a few are supported by simulations run in Vissim―a link for which appears at the end of this page.

Subject Listing

History of Economic Thought

Political Economy

• Critique of Neoclassical Economics

• Evolutionary Economics

Financial Economics (Debt Deflation & theories of endogenous money)

Managerial Economics

Honours Lectures:

• Advanced Political Economy

• Nonlinear Finance

• Macroeconomics

History of Economic Thought

These lectures are a combination of two subjects, so there is some overlap (starting with the second set of lectures on Marx)

• Introduction/Antiquity (Very large file [9MB] because of large images!)
• Antiquity to Physiocrats/Smith
• Classical to Marx
• Marx to Robbins
• Robbins to Keynes
• Keynes to Monetarism
• Monetarism to the Cambridge Controversies
• More on Marx
• More on Keynes
• Finance
• Methodology
• Debates: Nature of money and capital
• Debates: Economic Dynamics

Political Economy (Critique of Neoclassical Economics)

• Demand
• Supply
• General Equilibrium

Political Economy (Evolutionary Economics)

• Evolutionary theory in general (Large file [3MB] because of large images!)
• Early evolutionary economists (Veblen & Schumpeter)
• Complexity and Self-organisation
• Power laws and evolutionary modelling

Financial Economics (theories of endogenous money)

• Statistics on endogenous money
• Debates in endogenous money: Basil Moore & Sheila Dow
• The circuitist school
• Dynamic model of the Monetary Circuit
• Fisher and Debt Deflation
• Minsky: Modelling Debt Deflation
• Modelling Debt Deflation

Managerial Economics

• Conventional theory of the firm & a taste of reality

• Lecture 02: Blinder's empirical research into the actual behavior of firms

• Supplement to Lecture 02: An explanation of my research on why the neoclassical theory of the firm is illogical
• Lecture 03: Alternative theories of price including Galbraith, Post Keynesians, Sraffians & Schumpeter
• Lecture 04: Schumpeter's model of entrepreneurial profits
• Lecture 05: Game theory--warts and all
• Lecture 06: Ormerod's Schumpeterian model of competition
  • Ormerod's paper
• Lecture 07: Standard Macroeconomics

• Lecture 08: Data on US business cycle & Schumpeter's theory of cycles

• Lecture 09: Minsky's theory of financial cycles
  • Vissim viewer program for running models (install to run models below)
    • Basic Goodwin model (no finance)
    • Finance model (stable initial conditions)
    • Finance model (unstable initial conditions)
    • Mixed Economy model
• Lecture 10: The Capital Assets Pricing Model: Theoretical and Empirical Failure
• Lecture 11: New Approaches to Finance: Behavioural Finance, Econophysics and others
• Lecture 12: Standard Trade Theory, Warts and All...
• Lecture 13: Porter's Competitive Advantage + Subject Wrap-up

Honours Lectures

Advanced Political Economy

• Demand
• Supply
• Equilibrium
• Evolution
• Early Evolutionary Economists (Veblen & Schumpeter)
• Evolutionary modelling, dynamics & statics
• Power laws and econophysics

Advanced Political Economy 2007

• The necessity of nonlinearity
• How to be nonlinear
• Econophysics
• Critique of theory of the firm

Nonlinear Finance

• Philosophy of nonlinear finance: Marx, Keynes, Fisher, Schumpeter & Minsky
• The fundamentals of dynamics: differential equations
• Higher order linear and first order nonlinear ODEs
• Systems of ODEs and introducton to chaos/complexity
• Modelling the Financial Instability Hypothesis (part 1)
• Modelling the Financial Instability Hypothesis (part 2)
• An introduction to Econophysics

Macroeconomics

• Lecture 1: The sorry history of macroeconomics: from Say to Phillips via Keynes and Marx
• Lecture 2: Sorry history continued: from Monetarism to Rational Expectations via murdering Phillips

Models

• Link to Vissim version 3.0 (I use Vissim for my dynamic simulations in teaching, and Mathcad for my mathematical modelling). Vissim 3.0 is an earlier version of the current release, provided to university lecturers who use Vissim in their teaching and freely distributable to students. Those interested in commercial use of the current version (4.5 as of 2004) should go to the Vissim home page. You can also download a free viewer to check out files that use features in the newer version.
  • Lorenz vissim model (the classic "butterfly of chaos")
  • Goodwin vissim model
  • Minsky private sector model (stable initial conditions)
  • Minsky private sector model (unstable initial conditions)
  • Minsky mixed economy model (stable regardless of initial conditions)
  • Minsky mixed economy model (with compound blocks)
  • Generalised exponential function