Steve Keen

In August 2015, Keen endorsed Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.

Keen was formerly an associate professor of economics at University of Western Sydney, until he applied for voluntary redundancy in 2013, due to the closure of the economics program at the university. In autumn 2014, he became a professor and Head of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University in London. He is also a fellow at the Centre for Policy Development.

Recently, Keen commissioned the development of a software package called Minsky for visually modelling national economies, in a way that is intended to be more accurate than mainstream macroeconomic models – which he contends do not properly include debt and banking. He envisages it being used for both educational and research purposes.

The first phase of the development was funded by an academic research grant, as is typical for academic research projects – but in February 2013 Keen launched a crowdfunding project on Kickstarter to allow members of the public to contribute towards taking MINSKY to the next level of development. In the first 24 hours, this project raised approximately 15% of its funding target, and has since fully achieved its initial funding goal of $50,000.00.

Austrian-school economists Robert P. Murphy and Gene Callahan claim that Keen's 2001 book "suffers from many of the very faults of which he accuses the mainstream". They also claim that much of his work is "ideologically motivated even while criticising neoclassical economics for being ideological". They praise his critique of perfect competition, and his chapter on dynamic vs static models, whilst they criticise his attempts at objective value theory and what they claim is his misrepresentation of the Austrian interpretation of Say's law.

In 1990, he completed a Master of Commerce in economics and economic history at the University of New South Wales. He completed his PhD in economics at the University of New South Wales in 1998.

Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising 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, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay. Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis forms the main basis of his major contribution to economics which mainly concentrates on mathematical modelling and simulation of financial instability. He is a notable critic of the Australian property bubble, as he sees it.

Keen was born in Sydney in 1953. His father was a bank manager. Keen graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1974 and a Bachelor of Laws in 1976, both from the University of Sydney. He then completed a Diploma of Education at the Sydney Teachers College in 1977.

Keen's book closes with a survey of various schools of heterodox economics, concluding "None of these is at present strong enough or complete enough to declare itself a contender for the title of 'the' economic theory of the 21st century." However, he argues that neoclassical economics is a degenerative research program, not generating new knowledge but growing a belt of protective auxiliary hypotheses to shield its core beliefs from critique. There is an accompanying web site which provides more detailed mathematical expositions.

Keen has attempted to counter Karl Marx's theory (in his view Marx's pre-1857 view, specifically) from a post-Keynesian perspective, by arguing that machines can add more product-value over their operational lifetime than the total value of depreciation charged "during those asset lives". For example, the total value of sausages produced by a sausage machine over its useful life might be greater than the value of the machine. Depreciation, he implies, was the weak point in Marx's social accounting system all along. Keen argues that all factors of production can add new value to outputs. However he gives credit to Marx for contributing to the "financial instability hypothesis" of Hyman Minsky.