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

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“Another mate of mine comes to the Australian language. If I call you a bastard, that's a compliment. Depending on how I internate the word”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They appreciate that ironic side. Like, for example, the best compliment you can give as an Aboriginal to somebody else is that's deadly. A compliment. Deadly”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a great actually, there's a really good TikTok I saw earlier today with an Aboriginal guy saying he loves the Australian language because it's absolutely ironic. You ask an Australian a question and he'll give you an answer, which is the opposite of what he means. And you've got to work out the rest for yourself. It goes up to another Aboriginal maintenance. G'day, mate. He says, How are you going? Oh, not bad. What have you been doing recently? Well, not much. When are we going? Not too far, not too soon. Whereas they are not too far away All negatives, and he's a beautiful, beautiful rendition.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, he gave a seminar at New South Uni. A bit of an abstracturous Means argumentative and likely to dismiss you. So, like a good mate of mine was the guy who brought him out to Australia, a guy called Graham White. G'day, Graham, we're still good mates.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what has prevented it happening by the time he started writing about it, which was the late 50s? The mid 80s, late 80s. We met once, but only once. Over beer?”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coming back to America and studying mathematics and then also doing an economics degree leading to a PhD. And the question he posed for himself is what causes great depressions? And you put it beautifully. You said, can it happen again, it being the Great Depression? And if it can't happen, then what has changed between the society before the First Second World War and after that makes a depression impossible?”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hamen Minsky was the person who developed an analysis of capitalism based on financial instability And he was actually a PhD student of Joseph Schumpeter and an Austrian economist as well, whose name I've forgotten temporarily. And he asked him, his parents were both refugees from Russia during the Stalinist period because the Mensheviks were being wiped out in Russia just like any other opponents to the Bolsheviks were being eliminated. So I think his parents met in Chicago. Remain socialist, still remain politically active, and he was educated in a family that was just imbued with Marx as its vision. He ended up fighting in the Second World War. On the American side”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think to some extent it is, but I'm going to also say that if it hadn't been for the Bolsheviks interpreting Marx and saying we can reach socialism without going through capitalism, then... It might not have happened So, if you look at the Mensheviks in Russia, and that's where Hyman Minsky, who's a huge inspiration for me.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm saying your question, I think. Will be forced into that ultimately by having to make a compromise with the ecology. And we've been ruthless about the ecology of this planet, and we're going to pay the price for it. So if you have a planet where you can't be ruthless. Okay, you have to mind it as carefully as possible, then that utopian might be imposed upon you for the needs for survival on that planet. Back here, Marx's utopia was still the one that ignored the ecology. And I think if I have a vision of a utopia in future, it's got Bugger all to do about what humans get out of it. It's what humans respect. They have to respect life. I don't see that as a one eyed utopia, a utopia for a single species as if it can exist on its own, which we should know it can't.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is non reproducible, but the essence of capitalism is the commodity, the backscratcher, the two buck backscratcher. Anybody can, you know, the cheapest chips to make. And that's why you can make a profit out of them. Not the elaborate gold thing with diamonds and rubies that only the king gets. So we think our vision of scarcity has been perverted by neoclassicals, analyzing the exception to capitalism and calling it capitalism.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paintings, rare wines, etc. They are things you cannot reproduce in a factory. The essence of capitalism is what you can make in a factory. And therefore, for these unique objects, these rare objects, Picasso painting, you know, a beautiful bottle of wine, etc., etc., then the utility, it can't be reproduced easily. So its price will be determined by subjective valuation. If you said what we're talking about in capitalism is the stuff you can make en masse. And that is the true focus of a capitalist economy. And that is not about scarcity. That is about the honest scarcity applies when you don't have the resources to make them anymore, or you can't use the energy involved because you'll damage the biosphere too much, which we've already done. But fundamentally, the scarcity that neoclassicals have made us think about an Austrians think about as well.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, this is where, again, our vision of what scarcity is, is wrong. Because in Ricardo said this, it's actually better than Marx, because Ricardo said there are some products whose value is determined entirely by their scarcity.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is beyond capitalism? I think that beautiful phrase from each according to his ability to each according to his needs describes what we should end up with. And I think that's actually, if I think about, you know, you know I'm an Elon Musk fan, that's what I think is partially going to be the nature of society if we build one that functions on Mars because, and I've actually seen an interview with the Italian who's involved in designing what the future colony will look like he was actually asked this question, can there be enormous inequality in Martian civilization? The guy said absolutely not because the resources, again, resource constraint applies, you simply can't give somebody an underground bunker 100 times the size of somebody else's underground bunker. The scarcity of resources imposes a need for For equality overall.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we are running into a war with capitalism. In fact, I think we've already gone through the war and we haven't yet realised we've smashed our skulls.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had to do was build the factories. See, building the factories, but at a certain point you exhaust the supply of lowly employed or unemployed labour. And so rather than having this exponential takeoff, you hit a ceiling. And then you can only grow as fast as the population because you're not innovating. So that's what actually hit the Soviet system. And it's why they never buried the Western consumer goods. And instead, why Eastern consumers looked in envy at the goods being purchased by their Western people and said, if that's exploitation, we want exploitation.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of consumer good output, but then you would just go exponential. Now, I took a look at that back when I was doing my master's degree and training in mathematics, I took Feldman's equations and then looked at what was actually driving it was, he was imagining correctly a huge pool of unemployed labor. If you go back to the earliest stages of Soviet industrialization back in 1917 post the Second World, post the First World War, you had all these unemployed workers, you had all these peasants you could take off the land and put into factories. So you had a huge supply of workers.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and there's another remarkable Soviet engineer who was given the job of interpreting Marx's ideas of industrial sectors. So he had the commodity sphere, the industry sphere, sector one sector, two, sector three, sector one producing consumer goods, sector two producing capital goods, sector three producing luxury goods for capitalists. And so he had a three-sector model of the economy. And he was talking about the dynamics between them. What Feldman did was reinterpret this as an engineer would reinterpret it, which was brilliant work. So what he said was you need to produce the means of production. If you want to grow quickly, you focus on producing the means of production rather than commodities. So you don't make cars, you make car factories. You make a few cars, but most of the effort goes into expanding how many factories you have. And what he did was do a mathematical model where you'd start off with very low levels.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that was the fundamental failing that Giles Cornay saw. Why does socialism not innovate? Because if you go back to this famous historical incident where Khrushchev in the United Nations takes off his shoe and bangs the death says, we will bury you. He literally meant we're going to bury you in commodities. Going to produce more output than you are. And he was wrong.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he said capitalism, on the other hand, pure capitalist economy, you're trying to pay workers as little as possible, you have competitive industries, you're trying to take demand away from your rivals, you have Kawasaki versus Honda versus BMW, et cetera, et cetera. The way you get demand away from your competitors is by innovating. So what you will get is cycles and booms and slumps, but you will innovate and change over time. So what you found was this huge gap between socialist volume production with no innovation and capitalism with innovation”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this crate arrives with the Cossack motorbike inside it. So we take it apart, it's then got all these wooden palings. We have to pull off the wooden palings to open it up. Then there's oil-saked rag over this thing which is tied on a wooden base. Take the oil soak rag off and we stare in all its glory in a 1942 BMW. Okay, it was exactly the same as Steve McQueen and So the Russians for 30 years were making the same bloody motorbike. It had a bicycle seat. And this is how they cope. They've just made the same damn machine every year. He said, so that's the outcome. You actually want the best possible world. You're trying to build as fast as possible. You're paying workers as high wages as you possibly can. And that leads to a world where you don't innovate.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not to innovate, not to make change. So, what they will give you is as you start to add, you invest so you now have a beginnings of a steel industry, beginnings of a car industry, and so on, you start investing, but you continue producing the same product you made last year. And I have a perfect personal example of that, which I'll throw in now if you like, any pretty heavy conversation. Of my first major girlfriend had a brother who wanted to get a motorbike, but he couldn't afford a Honda or a Kawasaki. At the time, they cost about $3,000 for a $650cc Japanese motorbike. He found he could buy a Cossack for $650, $1 per cc. So I was there when the... This is in suburban Sylvania waters in Sydney.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the development under socialism rather than under capitalism. And this is what Janus was actually analyzing. You start from a primitive feudal economy, very little industrialization, and you want to jump to an advanced industrial society from that foundation. So he said what you have then for is a whole range of industries, all of which need as much resources as you can get for them. So you want to develop agriculture, mining industry, every little division of it. They all have legitimate demands on the resources of the country and the state. That means that all your resources are fully employed in a probably over-employed. So you have resource constraint in that society. The easiest way to cope with a resource constraint is to produce last year's commodity.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The advanced economies would be first to go through the revolution. The primitive economies would have to go through a capitalist transition. And this is the difference when the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. So the Mensheviks and Hyman Minsky came out of the Menshevik family. The Mensheviks believe you had to go through a capitalist phase. Russia had to go through a capitalist period before it becomes socialist. The Bolsheviks believed they could get there in one go bypass the capitalist phase.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Yarnis is 100% correct, and it's a brilliant piece of work, so I'm going to be really paraphrasing his view. And he imagined an ideal socialist society and there wasn't a Stalin, there weren't purges, and you lived up to all the ideals that Marx had for socialism. So he said, but you do it in a context of an economy which is incredibly primitive, Russia, okay? If you look at Marx's own vision of the revolution, it was going to happen in England”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It became incredibly complicated, and this is actually the best work on this is done by recently deceased Hungarian economist called Janos Kornay. And Kornai tried to explain why socialism failed.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to If you want to take a proper vision, then you have to say it's the ownership of the means of production by the state. Okay, versus the ownership by private, that rules out the Nazi period use the word. Again, they're bastardizing as much as Americans do. In the opposite direction.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It wasn't public owned. There was public direction, so the state would tell factories what to do with the still private profit and a large part of why the Nazis succeeded was the extent to which they managed to co-opt major manufacturers in Germany. So it's, you know,”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Centrally planned. This is what actually was done under Gaul's plan under the Soviets and even with a collective farms as well. You no longer own your own. The state owns the land you worked on the land. And this was supposed to be a utopia.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Socialism, particularly in America, is a very loaded term. I mean, what Americans call socialist is a large amount of provision of services by the state, which is commonplace in Europe. It's still moderately commonplace in my own home country of Australia. And that Americans will call public education socialist. It's a total parody of the word. Strictly speaking, what socialism meant is the public ownership of the means of production. No private ownership of the means of production.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's utopian in the context of our modern world. It says that rather than being rewarded, like Jeff Bezos gets enormous fortune, you get what you need, not what you want necessarily. All needs is fulfilled. It was a vision of Utopia where you could be a fisherman in the morning, a poet in the afternoon, and a chef at night. paraphrasing one of his phrases. So he did have a utopian vision of a future society. And he did think human creativity much, much greater under socialism than it was under capitalism. He was wrong.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should come about. He had a should, but he was trying to say must. If you look at Marx in the history of Radical thought. He was preceded by what were called utopian socialists, Saint-Simon, even the Cadbury's company came out of Utopian Socialist. And they had an idea about a perfect society in the future where people were properly rewarded, were treated as human beings rather than cogs in a machine and all this sort of stuff. And they said socialism should come about because it treats humans better than capitalism does. Mark said, I can prove that socialism must come about. So he preferred, he had a utopian vision of a future society, but he thought he could prove that it had to come about. And the proof relied critically upon tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and that relied upon Labor being the only source of profit.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The real foundation of Marxist political philosophy was the economic argument that there would be a tendency for the rate of profit to fall. And that tendency for the rate of profit to fall would lead to capitalists battening down on workers harder, paying them less than their subsistence, a revolt by workers against this, and then you would get socialism on the other side. So what he called the tendency for the rate of profit to fall played a critical role in his explanation for why socialism would have to come about.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Therefore, they're using the same logic. They can both be a source of surplus Is what Marx contradicted because his explanation for where socialism would come from is that only profit comes from, late profit comes only from labour over time will add more machinery than labour. That will mean a falling rate of profit and therefore a tendency towards socialism. And what he did in that insight in 1857 is contradict his own idea about what would lead to socialism. He couldn't cope with it”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That it can produce goods for sale exactly the same as the worker. What I've, in my modern reinterpretation of Marx, which brings in my work on energy, I see both labour and machinery as a means to harness energy and produce useful work. And they can both do that. In fact, they do it together. It's a collective enterprise.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the worker does six hours, six hours of work will make the means of subsistence for the worker, but the worker will work a 12-hour day and the six hours becomes a gap. Now, that's incommensurability between use, value and exchange value of labor. But when you look at what he said about no matter how long it takes to make a machine or how many pounds it costs, he's saying they're identical. And that's contradicting his own logic.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that normally means that exchange value is objective, like the number of hours it takes to make something, use value as subjective, how comfortable the chair is, the fact you can sit in a chair. So that's incommensurability. But when you apply it in production, the exchange value of something is objective. It's how many hours it takes to make a machine or how many hours it takes to make the means of subsistence for a worker. The use value is also objective. You're making commodities for sale.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That contradicts his previous logic because what he said is you'd have a commodity is the essential unity in capitalism. Capitalism focuses upon the exchange value that pushes the use value into the background and there's a tension between the two. What that means is the exchange value of a commodity sets its price. The use value is independent. You call them incommensurable. He literally used the word incommensurability between exchange value and a use value. Whereas neoclassicals make them commensurable. So you're saying exchange value and use value incommensurable.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what Marx argued, and you'll read this in Capital, and I read this in Capital when I first saw. Contradiction in his own thought. He said that no matter how useful a machine is, whether it took 100 hours to make or cost 150 pounds, it cannot under any circumstances add more to production than £150. Which, in his old exclusivist logic, he could justify, and which in his post 1857 argument is bullshit.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contemplated, which was not done before. This is wrote nice to himself, by the way. It's written really in a colloquial style, that the use value of a machine significantly greater than its exchange value. He actually left out the word is. This is obviously a translation into English of the German, I'm sure. I don't know. I haven't seen the original notes. I'd love to see them. But he says, he lives out the word is. It also has to be contemplated that the use value significantly greater than its exchange value, i.e. that the contribution of the machine to production exceeds its depreciation. And that was an insight which undermined his explanation for revolution.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changed him completely And from that point on, his writing was completely different, but he still had this idea from the Riccardian days of saying that Labour is the only source of value using an exclusive argument to say there's something unique about Labour that explains why it's a source of value. But suddenly this insight occurs to him and he thinks, I can get a positive derivation. I can use use value and exchange value and the fact they're not related to each other as a dialectical tension to explain surplus value. And that's what he does. So he goes from a negative explanation of where value comes from to a positive explanation on that page of the Grandisa. He then triumphantly uses it to explain why labour is a source of value. You buy it for its exchange value, you use its use value, they're unrelated, the use value will be bigger. That's where profit comes from. Then he does exactly the same thing for machinery, about 30 pages on. He says it also has to be...”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's beautiful, the integration of an idea. And he actually writes Does this have significance in economics question mark?”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He thinks, well, I can't ignore use value. So rather than leaving it out completely, which is what Ricardo and Smith does, I've got to somehow bring it in, and this Hegelian insider occurs to him. And it's remarkable, I really recommend taking a look at the book, even just to look at that particular page, because what it would have been shown as a footnote. But it would have been him saying, oh wow, and his asterisk, asterisk is not use value a fundamental aspect of the unity of a commodity.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But no, if you look at the classical school, they focus on exchange value, objective. Look at the neoclassical, they faces upon use value, subjective, or they call it utility. So Marx coming from the Ricardian tradition basically dismiss the role of utility. And then when he reads Hegel, he's suddenly starting to think in terms of unities and exchange value and use value is the unity of the commodity.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I was trying to find the point at which you discovered this use value exchange value idea It occurs in a footnote on page 267 to 268 of the Penguin edition of the Gwundrisa, which his notes he was taking literally not meant for publication, literally sitting at a stall inside the British Museum, I think, reading all the classical authors in chronological sequence, and then somebody throws Hegel at him and suddenly he's talking in Hegelian terms. And he suddenly says, is not because there's whole value issues, what is value? Is it exchange value, use value? How do they relate to each other? That's what he was thinking about. He said, is not use value, which was left out of the classical school, a fundamental aspect of the commodity? There's not a tension between the use value and exchange value”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he was reporting about the eviction of peasants from the forests, taking away their feudal rights. And so this is where his passion for economics and humanity came from. And he was a poet. Well, I mean, he wrote Love Poetry to Jenny von West Hale, and that's his first published works were pretty much in poetry. He was a rouseabout. He was a wild character. We'd probably fight like crazy, I imagine, if we met.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't a good thesis. I didn't know the level It was written for an audience. My supervisor thought that I should be writing for, and it was a mess. And so I met another guy, Jeff Fishburne, as a lecturer in New South Wales University. And Jeff was open-minded. He was not a conventional neoclassical thinker. And I realized I'd throw out the half that Bill had got me to do, focus just on Marx. And so I decided to read Marx in chronological sequence from his very first works of economics, which are called the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. And he wrote those in a garret in Paris after he'd been expelled from Prussia. And so he decided to read the, having been an expert on philosophy and regarded as the towering intellect of Hegelian philosophy in Prussia, but driven out because he was a radical. He ended up writing a newspaper or being writing for a newspaper.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my first master's thesis failed, by the way, and justifiably so. I was learning I didn't know the level of academic discourse necessary. I had an advisor who didn't understand what I was writing. He got me to write for his new Keynesian audience. And it was a mess and it got failed. So I got rid of him.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And a half pages long footnote. It's pretty hard to forget because when I did this, when I first read Mark's way, way back when I was, how old was I, 20? I tried to explain my explanation of Marx's use value, exchange value stuff, to my colleagues in this philosophy discussion room at Sydney University during a beautiful summer that we are inside concrete sandstone walls discussing Marx. And I went to say that the use value exchange value argument can be applied to a machine. What's the exchange value for machines? Cost of manufacturing. What's its use value? Its capacity to produce goods for sale. No relation between the two. There'll be a gap. A machine can be a source of profit. Now, I said that and I got laughed at. I quite literally laughed at. So when I went back to university 13 years later to do my master's degree, I chose to read through and find in marks where he first came across this.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Switched from Ricardo to Hege And what in Ricardo he had this exclusivist argument about labor, and suddenly Hegel is back talking in terms of dialectics, not actually using the word, but foreground and background and tension. And then that's where this use value, exchange value tension thing came from, is rereading Hegel 13 years after he stopped reading philosophy, because made in 44 he was reading just the economists.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, if you know your drugs well enough, you can tell, okay, he's stoned, okay, he's on cocaine, you know. Well, Mark suddenly his writing style in the middle of a book called The Grundrisa completely changed.”
2022-07-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #303 – Steve Keen: Marxism, Capitalism, and Economics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source