In this Smart Talk video series, Andrew Mazzone and new Steve Keen discuss neoclassical economics. It is an approach to economics that relates to supply and demand to an individual’s rationality and his or her ability to maximize utility or profit. Neoclassical economics also increases the use of mathematical equations such as of various aspects of the economy. This approach was developed in the late-nineteenth century, based on books by William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger and Leon Walras.
Steve Keen is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticizing neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific, and empirically unsupported. The major influences on Keen’s thinking about economics include John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, and François Quesnay. His recent work mostly concentrates on mathematical modeling and simulation of financial instability. Most of Steve Keen’s recent work focuses on modeling Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis and Irving Fisher’s debt deflation.