Professor Keen's Torrens Lecture

Earlier this year, I participated in the launch event for a new program of study in the Economics of Sustainability at Torrens University. The program offers students the opportunity to earn a Graduate Certificate, a Graduate Diploma or a Master’s Degree in the Economics of Sustainability—entirely online—with some of the world’s top MMT economists.

A number of you learned about, and subsequently enrolled in, the program after reading about it here at The Lens.

I don’t know how often the program director, Professor Steven Hail, will do this, but he has made public one of the lectures from the Master’s course. The presenter is Professor Steven Keen, prolific author and creator of the modeling software MINSKY. Steve also writes a Substack newsletter.

Steve doesn’t mince words here. He focuses on the significant daylight that exists between what the scientific community has been warning about and what neoclassical economists have told us about the risks of climate change.

He asks who is responsible for policymakers not seeing the devastating impact of climate change coming? His answer is that much of the blame rests with neoclassical “economists who have been the arms dealers giving the fossil-fuel companies the capacity to effectively plausibly deny the dangers we face.”