YouSaid · the spoken record

Steve Keen

lines on the record: 271
first: 2022-07-17
most recent: 2022-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But they're actually in favour of negative. They wanted to appreciate rapidly, and there's a declaratively negative inflation relative to commodities. That's what they want. That's the hottel philosophy.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bit ends up saying that overall the level of effective commerce, a bit of inflation is a good thing because that's depreciating the money slightly and encourages its use.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In spas, the means of exchange usage of money that undermines the store of value, usage of money. And that dilemma is why we have this antagonistic attitude towards inflation.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something crazy number like that when Hitler marched in. So the Wargle experiment showed that a depreciating currency led to a high rate of circulation. But of course, we're not talking Weimar Republic levels of inflation. So when you get that much inflation, and that's normally caused by as the Weimar inflation was caused by, the reparation terms imposed on Germany, fundamentally by France at the Treaty of Versailles, they paid a large part of that with just basically printing the notes and you went into this crazy period of hyperinflation. So hyperinflation almost always occurs when there's a massive destruction of physical resources and the monetary authority tries to paper, literally, over it, and then you get hyperinflation, that's total social breakdown. So a moderate level of inflation.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he thought, How can I stimulate demand here? So he produced a script which could only be used for buying goods and services in Wargle and could be used to pay your local rates. But it was depreciated by putting a stamp on the money if you didn't use it. So what happened was people would pay their rates, they needed to pay the rates using this money. So the script, so they'd use the script. because it depreciated you'd use it rapidly so people were using that money alternative to the austrian shilling and the economic activity in town took off and unemployment fell to zero and it was an absolute miracle and everybody loved a waggle experiment and the austrian central bank sued them for establishing an alternative form of money and shut it down unemployment went back up to 25 percent again and austria voted you know not 99 point what was it 99.6 percent for the nazis”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually in your interests as a store of value to hang on to it and not spend it. So that contradicts its role as a means of exchange. Now if you have money which depreciates, and this was actually tried in the Austrian town of Wargal during the Great Depression, if you have money that depreciates, then if you don't use it, you lose it fundamentally. So it has a high rate of circulation. So there's a monetary theorist called Sylvia O. Gazelle. And he wrote this proposal that money should depreciate. And he was ridiculed and opposed and derided, but Keynes said he was a great intellect. And the mayor of town of Wargall in Austria during the Great Depression was facing an unemployment rate now of 25% pretty much. Germany had the worst experience in the Great Depression in the world, as bad as America, slightly worse than America.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit is good for a simple reason. Again, it's taken me a while to get my head around this. But if you think about how people say, what are the functions of money? They say, money, it's a unit of count you're measuring. It's a means of exchange and it's a store of value. Now, yes, okay, it has those three roles, but the last one is contradictory to the previous two. And this is where we see this with the Bitcoin phenomenon. If you want to hang on to money as a store of value, Then, if prices are falling, the value of money is rising.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you had a 20% of GDP turnaround in aggregate demand. Now, when you plot that against unemployment, the correlation of credit to unemployment across the period from about 1990 to 2010 is about minus 0.9. Enormous negative correlation. Now, according to the neoclassicals, it could be close to zero. Empirically, it's bleedingly obvious it's not, and it applies to every country in the world that had a financial crisis at that period. So it's bleedingly obvious in the data, and they ignore it because credit's not part of their model.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part of aggregate demand and aggregate income. And that's something I first solved in 2019, I think, only recently proved it mathematically. So what that means is credit is a component of aggregate demand, and credit is also very volatile. So consumption demand never goes negative. Investment demand never goes negative. But credit can go from positive to negative. And when you take a look at the long run of American history after the Second World War, There was no period until 2007 where credit was negative, a positive component of a positive number. Therefore, when you do it as a percentage of GDP, it was a positive percentage of GDP. It peaked at 16% of GDP in 2006, 2007. It fell to minus 5% in 2008, 2009.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's absolutely crucial to aggregate demand. So, what they model is, again, the example of you lending to me or vice versa. If I lend money to you, I can spend less, you can spend more. Credit is the change in debt. So if I lend money to you, then there's a level of private debt rises. So there's an increase in credit, but that increase in credit comes at an expensive my spending power. So you can spend what I've lent you, but I can't spend what I've lent you. So credit cancels out. But when you look at, that's learnable funds. But in the real world, and the Bank of England has said this is the real world and the textbooks are wrong categorically in 2014. When the bank lends, it adds to its asset side and says you owe us more money and it adds to its liability side and says, here's the money in your bank account. Now you spend that money. So what happens when you do your sums, credit is...”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He can, he can But he's like the human face of neoclassical economics. It doesn't deserve having a human face. Anti human theory”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, I saw coming out of it, leaving aside the ecological wasn't a crisis, it was stagnation because what we got out of the crisis was caused by a rising level of private debt. Now you reach a peak level where the willingness to take on debt collapses. And so you go to a period where debt is rising all the time. So credit, which is the annual change in debt. And that's credit as part of aggregate demand and aggregate income. So credit goes from positive to negative. And that causes a slump.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I explained Minsky's theory and I use this throwaway line of saying debt levels, private debt have been rising exponentially. And then I thought, well, I can't, as an expert, just make a claim like that. I've got to check the data. And the debt ratio was rising exponentially. And I thought, holy shit, we're in for a financial crisis. And somebody has to warn about it. At least in Australia, I was that somebody.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was watching that and thinking that's like my model running, and I'm scared as shit that there'll be a breakdown. I ended up not working in the area for a while because I wrote debunking economics. And I got involved in a fight over the modelling of competition in neoclassical theory. That took me away for about four or five years. And then I got asked to do a court case in 2005, end of 2005. I used Minsky as my framework for arguing that somebody who was involved in predatory lending should be able to get out of the debt they were in.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A period where there's big booms and cycles, and then as the debt level rises, the berms and slums get smaller, and that looks like what neoclassical economists call the great moderation. So when I first modelled this in 1982, I finished up my paper, which was published in 95 with what I thought was a nice rhetorical flourish, saying the chaotic dynamics of this paper should warn us against regarding a period of relative stability in a capitalist economy as anything more than a lull before the storm. Now, I thought it was a grace piece of rhetoric. I didn't think it was going to fucking happen, but it did because you had this period from 1990 through to 2007, where there were diminishing cycles and the neoclassicals labelled that the great moderation, and they took the credit for it. less instability over time and they literally took credit for it”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Affect the capitalists. So, what you get is the cycles sort of diminish for a while because the income distribution effect is important. So the workers pay for the increasing level of debt. But the other side of it was that the cycles would diminish for a while. Now, what you get is a period of diminishing cycles then leading to rising cycles. And technically, this is known as the Pomer-Manaville route to chaos and it's one particular element of Lorenzo's equations of fluid dynamics. So what they found was in examining lamina flow and a fluid, you have a period where the lamina flow got more laminar and then suddenly it has started to get less laminar and go turbulent. And this is what actually goes on in the model. So in my model of Minsky, so what you have is...”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Effectively, the workers end up paying for it. They get a lower level of wages. And the basic dynamic is that capitalists, when you have a three social class system, your income goes between workers, capitalist and bankers. Now, in the system, the good one did, there are just workers and capitalists. So if workers share rows, profit capital share had to fall. But when you have three social classes, then capital share can remain constant while workers fall and bankers fall in bankers rise. So that's what actually happened because capitalists, the simple way I modeled it was there's a certain rate of profit at which capitalists invest all their profits. Above that, they borrow more. Below that they pay off debt. So what would happen is when you got back to that point, then the level of investment would be precise share of GDP. And therefore, you get a precise rate of economic growth. But if there was a higher percentage going to bankers and offset by a lower share going to workers, it did.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those three equations are fundamentally like going from the Lochter Volterra model with just two equations, and therefore you get a fixed cycle to the Lorentz model where you have three. And therefore what I got out of it was a chaotic outcome. Manifestation of chaos, complexity in those plots. But the fascinating, one of the many fascinating parts about it was that as the level of private debt rose, In my model, I had capitalists being the only ones who borrowed. But the people who paid for the high level of private debt were the workers Rising banker's share corresponded exactly to a falling worker's share.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I thought, okay, well, I'm going to have is what Goodwin presumed as capitalists to invest all their profits. So you get a boom when there's a high rate of profit because they invest all that money and then a slump when there's low profit because depreciation will wipe away capital and you'll go boom and slump. So I simply added in, well, capitalists will invest more than their profits during a boom, but less than their profits during a slump. That therefore means they had to borrow money to finance the gap and pay interest on the debt. So I ended up with a model with just three system states, the income share, the wages, distribution of income between workers, capitalists and bankers, the level of employment and the level of private debt.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you start off with a very few cows, lots of grass, and then because of lots of grass, the numbers of cows grow, and then because the cows grow, they start to eat the grass. So the grass runs out, so the cows starve, and you get a cycle. And what Lochter was amazed by was that the cycles were persistent. They didn't die out. So Goodwin got that vision and he then built a predator prey model. And I first of all read Goodwin and really found it really hard to follow his writing. He's not a very good writer. But a guy called John Blatt, who was a professor of mathematics at New South Wales University, wrote a brilliant explanation of Goodwin's model in a book called Dynamic Economic Systems. And I read that. It was superb. And he said a way you could extend this was to include finance.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got too caught up in the whole philosophy and never really got to build the model. But what Goodwin realized was a predator-prey model. They'll lock the Volterra model was the basis of the idea. You say what the idea is you have a prey and the example that Lochter actually used initially was grass is the prey. And then you have a predator and the predator were cows.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a cyclical economy, and as it happens, Mark spent his later years trying to learn enough calculus to be able to model it himself mathematically, and he never managed this Marxist and mathematical notes on calculus which are quite fun to read, and if you have a mathematical background.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He built a verbal model of a cyclical system, and it's quite out of character with the rest of the book. So when you read volume one of Capital, people think Marx has got commodity money view of money. He doesn't at all. He simply did, the idea was he had like an onion. You start off on the middle level and you ignore the outer layer, then you bring the outer layer and so on and so forth. Anyway, in this model, in volume one of Capital, he normally just seeing work has got a subsistence wage. That's it. But in this little chapter, he said that if the economy is effectively, he said, economy is booming, then workers will the man wage rises. And the wage rises will cut into the profit so that capitalists will not get the level of profit they're expecting. Therefore, they will invest less and the economy will slump. And the slump will mean workers become unemployed and have to accept wage cuts. And it was a model.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. That particular parameter, Algus, to give that outcome. But what happened when I first simulated the model? I took a model by a guy called Richard Goodwin, who's one of the great neglected economists, American Marxists, mathematical Marxist. And what he did was build a model of cycles. And he actually wrote a paper called It's only about a five-page paper published in a book and a very, very obscure conference paper. And what he was doing was trying to build a model of Marx. He wrote it in 1967 and it was putting it in a mathematical form a model that Marx came up with an 1867. So it was a centenary birthday present to Marx. And what Marx had argued in chapter 25, I think, of volume one of Capital, Section 3.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If only engineers rather than this particular case, there was a bunch of marketers for CAD software agreed. I'm definitely a fan of engineers.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been ruined by bad management. They chucked out all the good engineers, and I'm still using a version which is 12 years old.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I find it's very much a programmer's approach to mathematics. I prefer a program called MathCAD, which is what I'm using for all my, when I do my mathematics on the computer, I write in mathematics.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have a positive and a negative if you're looking on the liability side, a positive and a positive or a negative and a negative, you're looking at assets and liability side. And Minsky gets the accounting right for that. So you can do an enormous complex model looking at the economy financially from the point of view of a dozen different actors in the economy and know that the mathematics is right, even though what you're building is set a differential equations, which might be 50 differential equations with 350 terms in them. If you get the Godly tables right, you know the mathematics is correct. So that's the main innovation that Minsky adds.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, fundamentally. Actually, it's circuit diagrams. It's exactly what engineers have been using for decades, almost a century. So you're using a circuit diagram to model the economy. And so other packs have done it. What they haven't had in the circuit diagram is a way of handling the dynamics of the financial system. So what the godly table does is bring it financial flows as being everything goes from somewhere and ends up somewhere.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was doing his work in the 50s. People don't know Forrester's work. He actually built the models of the mathematics for the gun turrets on American warships in the Second World War, mechanical systems, obviously. So he had to work out how to give a feedback system that meant when the boat rolled in one direction, the turret did not roll the other way. All that stuff was his work. So marvelous engineering. And then he realized if you want to look at even like a factory, A factory is a complex system. And so he gets cycles generated out of the interaction between different components of the factory that he was first involved in taming, that he built the software to model complex interactive systems. So Minsky is that the thing at Minsky adds, which is unique, is the godly table. And that's the double entry bookkeeping, so you can model the financial system.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, what Minsky is doing is system dynamics modeling. So if anybody's used Stella or VenSim or Simulink, then they've used exactly the same family of software that Minsky is part of. So I didn't invent that. That was invented by Jay Forrester, who's one of the great intellects, one of the great engineers in American history. And the idea of Forrester's system was complex interactions.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and also, like, I think we can afford to be bold in space. That's one reason I respect the practical vision of Musk on the sofa, impractical vision of Bezos, that if we're going, if we look for the very far future, the only way we can continue expanding our knowledge of the universe is to move our civilization. Productive side of off the planet”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A vote, and therefore we ban abortion or we don't whatever else happens. It's seeing what the, respecting the fact that we're in a complex system and being uncertain about the consequences and not making the bold expansionary. Ideas that we've been doing.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and therefore we need to have people who can understand complex systems making those decisions. Now that means it isn't a political system as much as it is an appreciation that the world is a complex system and therefore effects which we think are direct effects will actually come through in oblique fashion. And we cannot there's no simple linear progression from where we are to where we want to be. So you have to see how everything feeds together in a systemic way. And that's why one reason I designed the software I'm wearing the t-shirt on our Minsky is to have it's nowhere near to this scale. I hope it one way will be, but something which means we can bring together all that complexity, all those systems and perceive them on an enormous screen where we have all the various interacts and we can see what a potential future is. And that then guides us. So it isn't a case of democracy and outside wins.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like in many ways, what native societies often have a vision of the cycle of life, not this exponential progression we've developed over the last 250 years. And again, I'll use another movie, The Avatar type Respect for the Cycle of Life. We need to have that as part of our innate nature. And then on top of that, the political system comes out. Now that political system has to be one that lets us feel like we have a say in... Direction of society while that part is sacrosanct. We can't touch it, but we also, because we are now living with so many challenges created by our own civilization. I mean, the main threat to the existence of human civilization is the existence of human civilization.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without our interference, without our dominance. Now, that's neither a democratic system nor an authoritarian one. It's one which starts off with saying the first thing humans have to do is respect life itself. So, would we do that? We haven't done it, obviously. I don't think the Soviets would have done it if we had a generally Soviet system. We haven't done it a capitalist. We continue intruding. So I think we have to go through something like a Star Trek, a Star Trek catastrophic 200 years to realize that ultimately if we're going to survive as a species, we have to respect life in general. And then that means we parts of parts of the planet we can no longer touch. While we also try to maintain the planet at the temperature that we founded in what we now call the anthropocene. So politically, we have to have”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what's Agent Smith says when he's got Morpheus in his possession? He said, I've been trying to classify your species and if you decided you're a virus. Now, there's truth to that. We have intruded into everything. We've taken over every element of the biosphere. And we think we can continue doing Thing is, we're breaking, we're exporting it so much, we're breaking it down. And I think it's EO Wilson who argued for the 50% rule, he believed that we should reserve 50% of the planet for non-human species. In other words, we make 50% of it off limits. Humans cannot go there. And we just let that evolve as it does. And then we control the other 50%. I think it's probably giving too much to us. I think we should actually save like 20%, 25% max, and the rest of the planet, we let life go on and evolve as it does”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got some I mean, we are a parasite. You look We're the mosquitoes of the large organizations. You're a fan of the Matrix movies at all? Okay, you know the season where”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the fact that it exists in the first place is the free lunch. So we're exploring the free lunch. But to be able to do it, we can't put waste back into that system so much that it undermines the free lunch. And that's what we've been doing. And once you respect the fact that we have to, living on the biosphere of the planet we're actually on, we have to enable that biosphere to survive us because it doesn't survive us we won't survive it disappearing. And there's not that realization in humanity in general.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you know Ginsburg's summary of the laws of thermodynamics, don't you? Alan G The laws of thermodynamics are summarized A, you can't win B, you can't break even See you can't leave the game.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you take that structure that I talked about of Marx's use value exchange value dialectic, the foreground background, that only exists, that only works because we're exploiting the free energy we find in the universe. There could be no production system without free energy, which is the first law of thermodynamics that exists.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we first of all have to appreciate where one species on a planet out of millions. And as the intelligent species, we should be enabling a harmonious life for those other species as well.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hyperbaric weapons, which didn't exist in the Second World War. So you don't need nuclear weapons to have catastrophic attacks on each other. So, yeah, it's an incredibly scary, the warlike side of human nature could be extremely enhanced by climate breakdown.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's, yeah, I mean, there's an argument that's actually behind to some extent, not the Ukraine war so much, but the Arab Spring, the wars in Syria, which partially has led to what's happening in Ukraine.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just that tiny top bit that we evolved in. So, what we should have done is, oh, that's really useful for us. We should stay at that level. Now, if we hadn't done it, we'd go back down here, and that would be the end of our civilization by an ice age. Instead, we're going up here really rapidly. And we're causing a change in temperature compared to the long-term cycle 100,000 times faster.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ice age would have started to wipe out our farming areas, the glaciers would have encroached, and we would have been driven out of like an agricultural sedentary civilization by that change. So it's just the fact that we evolved on this stable period in the overall temperature cycle of the planet. And that stability is something which just reflects this turning point in the regular cycle. Malachevich cycle, I think it's called. I've forgotten the actual name, but it's a cycle caused by change in the Earth's orbit around the Sun reflectivity and so on. That cycle.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reasserts itself. So the Earth's going to survive us. Will we survive what we do to the Earth? That's the question. And my feeling is that we have underplayed the extent to which the civilizations were built have depended upon a relatively stable climate. And there's that turning point in the global average temperature that we evolved right on the top of it. And if we had done nothing, we could find that heading back down towards another ice age could equally destroy the possibility of sedentary life. For example, if we'd never developed fossil fuel-based industries, we'd never built superphosphate. So a population would never have reached 1 billion people. And we were still living fairly sophisticated animals, but 17th century level of load on the planet, then we would have gone down that decline. And the approaching...”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what worries me because it's all been put into the sort of sea level rise, temperature changes. It's not put into the fragility of the system in which we currently live. And the Earth will survive. And there's a wonderful science fiction book called The Earth Abides about a world in which humans get wiped out. There's only a tiny band left and then the Earth.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That comes down to the difference that Elon makes between producing a prototype and mass producing the prototype. You can develop the idea very rapidly to put that into production on the scale that's necessary to replace what we're currently doing. And we haven't got years. We might have decades. We certainly haven't got centuries. So in the time frame we've got, I can't see that engineering going from prototype to production levels to replace what we're currently doing in the stable environment we're currently destroying.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the food production side. And if you have that increase in temperature, then you're going to get a change in precipitation. And it could mean that where the rainfall and the sunshine are adequate for growing wheat is an area where there's no topsoil. It's like a huge part of the models the economists use, which only use temperature, don't include precipitation. They predict that a large amount of the wheat output of the world is going to occur in Siberia. The frozen tund”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source