Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Steve Keen, a Fellow at University College London, believes other economists are biased to believe that “capitalism can handle anything,” that a “war base” is required to correct the “total misrepresentations” made by economists.
“War basis” needed to correct economists’ misjudgments about climate change, says Professor
PUBLISHED SUN, MAY 23, 20219: 55 EDT
Karen Gilchrist
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Mainstream economists “deliberately and completely” ignored scientific data and instead compiled “their own numbers” to suit their market models. Steve Keen, a fellow at University College London’s London Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security, told CNBC on Friday.
Now a “War level“Is needed to have any hope of repairing the damage,” he said.
“Basically The economists have completely misrepresented science and ignored it where it contradicts their bias that climate change is not a big deal because, in their opinion, capitalism can handle anythingKeen said about Street Signs Asia.
Keen said the effects of climate change were predicted in the EU 1972 publication “The Limits to Growth” – a divisive account of the devastating consequences of global expansion – but economists have ignored their warnings then and since, preferring instead to rely on market mechanisms.
“If their warnings had been taken seriously and we’d done what they suggested and changed our trajectory from 1975 onwards, we could have done it gradually, by doing things like Carbon tax and so on, ”he said. “Because economists have delayed it by another half a century, we as a species put three to four times the pressure on the biosphere.”
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Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/24/war-footing-needed-to-correct-economists-climate-change-failings.html
Part of the problem, of course, is that academics like Steve Keen are way too shy when describing their position. “The Limits to Growth” strongly suggest that population growth and economic growth are linked. I’m sure we all would have liked to know more about Professor Steve Keen’s plans to limit the world’s population. Unfortunately, Steve doesn’t seem to have explained any of this to CNBC, or maybe CNBC decided not to make this part of the interview public.
Of course, “The Limits to Growth” is not without its critics. Peter Passell, Marc Roberts, and Leonard Ross’s 1972 answer probably single-handedly made the phrase “single-handedly” popular.Garbage in, garbage out“.
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The book is called The Limits to Growth and its message is simple: either civilization or growth must end soon. Continued population and industrial growth will deplete the world’s minerals and plunge the biosphere into deadly levels of pollution. As the authors summarize, “If current growth trends remain unchanged, the limits of growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next hundred years.”
“The Limits to Growth” is a product of an interdisciplinary MIT team led by Dennis Meadows. It is funded and published as part of the “Human predicament project”, an activity of the Club of Rome. The Club of Rome is a four-year-old international organization of 75 technocrats and business people who have defined themselves as an “invisible college” dedicated to researching the “complex of problems that concern men of all nations,” including poverty, environmental degradation and Alienation from youth, rejection of traditional values and monetary disruption. According to the club, these “seemingly different” problems are part of a single “world problem” that can now be analyzed with the help of computers. Using techniques developed by MIT systems engineer Jay Forrester, the Meadows team claims to have limited the underlying fallacy of industrial expansion.
“The limits of growth” is from our point of view empty and misleading work. Its imposing contraption of computer technology and system jargon hides a kind of intellectual Rube Goldberg device – one that takes arbitrary assumptions, shakes them up, and draws arbitrary conclusions that have the ring of science. “Limits” provides a level of security that is so exaggerated that it obscures the few humble (and unoriginal) insights it really contains. Less than pseudoscience and little more than polemical fiction, “The Limits to Growth” can best be summarized not as a rediscovery of the laws of nature, but as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim in computer science: Garbage in, garbage out.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/02/archives/the-limits-to-growth-a-report-for-the-club-of-romes-project-on-the. html
The Limits to Growth attorney Steve Keen seems like a fascinating character. According to Wikipedia, he requested a voluntary dismissal in 2013 after the University of West Sydney shut down its economic program. Since then he seems to have found his spiritual home with Keynesians on the far left in London, where he is now the director of the School of Economics, History and Politics at Kingston University. Undoubtedly, Steve exerts a significant influence on the course material studied by students entrusted to him.
Steve Keen seems to have a huge following on Patreon, a platform for giving people money. He wrote a very long essay on how wonderful it is when people give him money and thanked the people who support his efforts to undo the blind belief in capitalism.
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