#134 - Steve Keen - How Modern Economics Became Ideology

Economists get away with this garbage, and it is garbage in my opinion, because you don't need the economist to have an economy. The economy is something which exists independent of economists. That doesn't apply to engineering. Without engineers, you don't have engineered products. So economists effectively have no skin in the game to use Taleb's phrase they can say whatever they like and still be taken seriously if they get inside the mind of a politician and that's where economics turns into ideology This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Ayran, the AI cloud for the next big thing. Ayran builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure all powered by renewable energy. Now if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is iren.com. Steve, hi. Hi. Good to be back here. How long ago since we last talked? I'm gonna say it was very early when I did the podcast. I'm gonna say seven or eight years. Okay. Okay. Yeah. A long time ago. And you know what? Funny enough, that show still, does really well. Oh, okay. You're you're you're a good guest to have for Google. It's, lived well, but, I'm glad we're doing it in person. Mhmm. And, you know, the show is very different now. I deeply care about two things right now, economics and politics and the cross section of the two. Yeah. Yeah. And therefore, the future of this country. Mhmm. I think about it a lot. And so it's good to talk to you again. I've obviously, been entrenched into the Austrian school quite a bit. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And, I'm sure we'll have things we agree or disagree on that. But really, I'm just more interested in in you and what you talk about. Why does economics matter? Oh, economics is the description of the the way in which our social system functions. So if you wanna know how it functions, you've gotta know economics, but the question is, does economics actually fulfill its task? In my opinion at the moment, no, it does not. It just we have a whole range of competing schools of thought about how the economy operates, all of which talk past each other, and that's standard for competing paradigms in virtually any discipline. But the reality is most of our decision making about how we should change the economy to make it work better works from what I can fundamentally prove in myths. And therefore, if you kind of this is the the fundamental guiding principle for me is you can't reform what you don't understand. And And that's what I find is the nature of economics. Would would economics work better without politics? It'd work better without economists, frankly. I I think it's, I mean, the extent to which economists have clouded the theory of …