Steve Keen, sell-out

Professor Steve Keen, possibly the greatest economist of our time and Castalia House author-to-be, admits that he is a sold-out member of no less than FOUR grand conspiracies:

How I sold out to the Putin-Soros-Murdoch conspiracy to destroy Western civilization

I was delighted to find myself in the Top Ten (alright; top 15) of the European Values list of 2,326 “Useful Idiots” appearing regularly on RT shows, and thus legitimizing Vladimir Putin’s attempt to destroy Western civilization as we know it.
Why delighted? Because it completes the set of conspiracies to which I can now be accused of belonging. They include:

• The Putin Conspiracy, since I am regularly interviewed on Russia Today (and even worse, I now get paid to write for RT!);

• The Soros Conspiracy, since my research, has been funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) which he established;

• The Murdoch Conspiracy, since I appear every week on Sky News Australia with Carson Scott, and I used to get paid by News Ltd to write a weekly column; and

• The Alt-Right Conspiracy, since I’ve signed a book contract with Vox Day’s publishing firm Castalia House.

I can confirm the latter. We have the privilege to be publishing what Steve describes as his “magnum opus”, a work that I have reason to believe may prove not only significant, but utterly revolutionary. As for the others, I fear we shall have to settle for taking his word on them. Speaking of economics, it might interest you to hear that I am writing a piece addressing free trade and nationalism for a first-rate anthology that will appear next year from another publisher.

I will be doing a Voxiversity variant of it for our third video, after #001 Immigration and War and #002 Comics and Culture War.

But back to Steve:

So not only am I a “useful idiot,” I’m a useful idiot for four contradictory conspiracies. Does that make me a double-double agent?

No, it makes me someone who’s quadruple pissed off with people who attempt to understand the world from the perspective of conspiracy theories in the first place. I don’t deny the existence of conspiracies: in fact, far from it, because they’re everywhere. What I do deny is the implicit assumption that the conspirators understand the system they’re attempting to manipulate.

For example, I’ve heard plenty of conspiracy theorists assert that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve/George Soros (Hi George!)/Hedge Funds/Academic-Economists-Who-Peddle-The-Efficient-Markets-Hypothesis, and “they” profited from it.

This implies “they” knew what “they” were doing. Pardon me, but I’ve met many of these protagonists—and in the case of academic economists, I’ve worked with them for 30 years. “They” don’t have a clue (except George). Even those that were actively conspiring—like many hedge funds during the subprime bubble were doing so on the basis of utterly deluded theories about how the system they were trying to game actually worked. Where apparent conspiracies did work, like Soros’s punt against the British Pound decades ago, they did so because a CSP (Clever Sinister Person) bet against the conventional wisdom of others who thought they understood the system (and did not), rather than because the CSP set up the whole thing in the first place.

I used to work out with a guy running a very large global corporation. And by large, I mean annual turnover measured in the billions. He disabused me of any notion that the central bankers were smart; after returning from one meeting with the Bank of England’s Court of Directors, he said something about hoping the directors were somebody’s puppets, because if those bozos were actually running anything, the global economy was doomed.