Keynote Speech to the Aus­tralian Teach­ing Eco­nom­ics Con­fer­ence  -  Steve Keen

This is the keynote speech that I gave to the Aus­tralian Teach­ing Eco­nom­ics Con­fer­ence, the paper for which will be the sub­ject of my next two posts: the decline of Eco­nom­ics from up to 40% of any busi­ness degree to about 4% today. In it I sug­gest that het­ero­dox econ­o­mists should com­plete the march to zero by jump­ing ship and join­ing Account­ing depart­ments. There they could develop a "Mon­e­tary Eco­nom­ics for Accoun­tants" unit that would replace the stan­dard Intro­duc­tory Eco­nom­ics sub­ject required for accred­i­ta­tion as an accountant.

Most academic disciplines need undergraduate students from other departments to be taking their courses in order for the discipline to remain viable and vital. Steve reports that, at universities around the world, the requirements for economics is being dropped from degrees other than economics. Now if we could just get the Sveriges Riksbank to stop awarding their Nobel Memorial Prize we could get on with developing a genuine social science in place of the pseudoscience that currently acts as a very large dog in an increasingly barren manger.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."