Louis and the rest of you all,
Well, Steve has been publishing a number of
papers for some time combining chaos theory with
Minsky-type theories of financial fragility and instability
that suggest the possibility of a finance-generated
great crash that could generate a new Great Depression
(reminder of the late Hyman Minsky's most dramatic book
title, _Can "It" Happen Again?_). The paper that was
noted earlier in the edited volume on _Commerce,
Complexity, and Evolution:..._, 2000, Cambridge
University Press, is of this ilk,
"The nonlinear dynamics of debt deflation," pp. 83-110.
Some other relevant titles from Steve's oeuvre include
"Finance and Economic Breakdown: Modeling Minsky,"
Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 1995, vol. 17,
pp. 607-635.
"From Stochastics to Complexity in Models of Economic
Instability," Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life
Sciences, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 151-172.
For people interested in seeing simulations of
whooping and zooping crashes triggered by financial
instability, these are pretty funky stuff.
These are all single-authored, and he has more along
similar lines.
Barkley Rosser
----- Original Message -----
From: "Louis Proyect" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2001 8:37 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:9596] Re: Re: Interesting new book?
> I just found something on Jerry Levy's list that may shed some light on
> Keen's thinking:
>
> Jerry Levy:
> And, by the way, the revolution will come! And, I hope that the members of
> this list will live long enough to see that day. Indeed, I hope to stand
> shoulder-to-shoulder with many of them some day at the barricades. And
> then, in the words of the poet J. Bruce Glasier, "We'll turn things upside
> down"
>
>
> Steve Keen:
> Well, good luck. I am rather a cynic of the prospects for revolutionary
> change, and the possibility of the resultant society bearing any
> resemblance to the hopes of those who fought for revolution. This attitude
> emanates not just from my reading of Marx, but also my knowledge of
complex
> dynamics: I can hardly meld a knowledge of 'sensitive dependence in intial
> conditions' with a belief that revolutionary change will have the eventual
> outcome which revolutionaries desire.
>
> So I doubt the occurrence of outright revolution in western capitalist
> nations (though not so third world ones), and I dispute that such change,
> if it occurred, would result in the sort of society you desire.
>
> However, of more immediate relevance, I believe that advanced capitalism
> (specifically, the economies of the USA, Japan and England) are about to
> experience their most severe crisis since the Great Depression. I might be
> wrong about this, but if I am correct, it will be an easy matter to show
> that there has been *no* analytic discussion on this list of how this
> crisis came about. This is because understanding this crisis involves an
> appreciation of the role of credit money and debt, and this requires a
> non-commodity theory of money which is antithetic to the commodity
approach
> to money derived from a labour theory of value. So in that sense,
following
> on from your post which inspired my somewhat flippant comment, forthcoming
> events may well leave this list as "kind of Marxist equivalent to Nero's
> playing the fiddle while Rome was burning".
>
> Full exchange at:
> http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/OPE/archive/0103/0084.html
>
> Louis Proyect
> Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
>
>
