In our article titled “Steve Keen 101: Who is the Australian Economist and Author?” on Zatrun.com, we will delve into everything you need to know about the Australian economist and author, Steve Keen.

Who is Steve Keen?

Born in Sydney in 1953, Steve Keen’s father was a bank manager. Keen graduated from the University of Sydney in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, followed by a Law degree in 1976. He also completed an Education Diploma at Sydney Teachers College in 1977. In 1997, he completed his PhD in Economics at the University of New South Wales.

Steve Keen is an Australian economist and writer born on. He identifies himself as a post-Keynesian and criticizes neoclassical economics for being inconsistent, unscientific, and unsupported empirically. Keen’s economic thought is influenced by various figures such as John Maynard Keynes, Karl Marx, Hyman Minsky, Piero Sraffa, Augusto Graziani, Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and François Quesnay. His greatest contribution to economics is in modeling and simulating financial instability based on Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis. Keen is also known for his criticisms of the Australian real estate market bubble.

Keen was a professor of economics at Western Sydney University until 2013 when he voluntarily left due to the program’s closure. In 2014, he became a professor and the head of the School of Economics, History, and Politics at Kingston University in London. He was also a member of the Centre for Policy Development. Since then, Keen has retired and is currently an Honorary Research Fellow conducting independent research through Crowdfunding at the Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security at University College London.

Economics Field:

• Financial Instability and Debt Deflation: The majority of Steve Keen’s recent research focuses on modeling Hyman Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis and Irving Fisher’s debt deflation. The hypothesis predicts the ratio of private debt to GDP that can cause deflation and depression. This leads to a decrease in the price level, resulting in a continuously increasing real unpaid debt amount. Additionally, continually removing unpaid debt increases the deflation rate. Therefore, debt and deflation interact and react to each other, leading to a debt deflation spiral. Keen argues that the current global economic crisis is largely the result of excessive private debt.
• Political Views: In August 2015, Steve Keen supported Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign for the UK Labour Party. As of October 2021, Keen is planning to run as a Senate candidate for the New Liberals in the 2022 Australian federal elections in New South Wales.