Steve Keen

"This ascendancy of economic theory has not made the world a better place. Instead, it has made an already troubled society worse: more unequal, more unstable, and less 'efficient'."

"With the market so much more in control of the global economy now than fifty years ago, then if economists are right, the world should be a manifestly better place: it should be growing faster, with more stability, and income should go to those who deserve it."

"Though mainstream economics began by assuming that his hedonistic, individualistic approach to analysing consumer demand was intellectually sound, it ended up proving that it was not."

"Thus while diminishing returns do exist when industries are broadly defined, no industry can be considered in isolation from all the others, as supply and demand curve analysis requires."

"Not even an economist can make time stand still (though some victims of economics lectures might dispute that!)."

"Economics is not the Emperor of the social sciences, but the Humpty Dumpty."

"Which comes first — price being set by the intersection of supply and demand, or individual firms equating marginal cost to price?"

"Even economists can't escape the fact that, as commodities go, labour is something out of the ordinary."

"The term 'capital' has two quite different meanings in economics: a sum of money, and a collection of machinery."

"The position I favor is that economics is a science, but a rather pathological one."

"In general then, and contrary to Friedman, abandoning a factually false heuristic asumption will normally lead to a better theory — not a worse one."

"What makes economics different from and inferior to other sciences is the tenacity with which it holds to its core beliefs in the face of either contrary factual evidence or theoretical critiques that establish fundamental inconsistencies in its intellectual apparatus."

"Economic theory in general ignores processes which take time to occur, and instead assumes that everything occurs in equilibrium."

"Why do economists persist in modelling the economy with static tools when dynamic ones exist; why do they treat as stationery an entity which is forever changing?"

"The obsession with equilibrium has imposed enormous costs on economics."

"If there was never any difference between the value of commodities someone desired to sell and buy on the market, then no-one would ever desire to accumulate wealth. But an essential feature of capitalism is the existence of a group of agents with precisely that intention."

"Rather like the Bible is for many Christians, the General Theory is the essential economics reference which few economists have ever read."

"The belief that a capitalist economy is inherently stabilising is also one for which inhabitants of market economies may pay dearly in the future."

"Trusting souls who accept economic assurances that markets are efficient are unlikely to fare any better this time when the Bull gives way to the Bear."

"Since in reality the stock market is inhabited by mere mortals, there is no way that the stock market can be efficient in the way that economists define the term."

"The EMH cannot apply in a world in which investors differ in their expectations, in which the future is uncertain, and in which borrowing is rationed."

"If investors disagree about future prospects of companies, then inevitably the future is not going to turn out as most — or perhaps even any — investors expect."

"If values are fairly evenly distributed around an average, then roughly two-thirds of all outcomes will be one standard deviation other side of the average."

"If financial markets aren't efficient, then what are they? According to the 'fractal market hypothesis', they are highly unstable dynamic systems that generate stock prices which appear random, but behind which lie deterministic patterns."

"There are numerous theorems in economics that rely upon mathematically fallacious propositions."

"If a 19th century capitalist Machiavelli had wished to cripple the socialist intelligentsia of the 20th century, he could have invented no more cogent weapon than the labour theory of value. Yet this theory was the invention, not of a defender of capitalism, but of its greatest critic: Karl Marx."

"You have a voice, which has been perhaps been quiescent on matters economic because you have in the past deferred to the authority of the economist. There is no reason to remain quiet."