Written by economist Steve Keen, one of the few professional economists to have correctly anticipated the global financial crisis of 2008, eCONcomics is a series of three satires explaining why the science of economics has gone so terribly wrong. In these savagely erudite satires, Keen highlights the lameness of the excuses offered by economists for their failure to predict anything from the financial crisis to the recent stock market highs. From “secular stagnation” to the “non-accelerating inflation rate of employment” and the “full employment real interest rate”, Keen expertly mocks both the myths and the incompetence of his professional colleagues.
After reading eCONcomics, you will understand why no economist ever seems to be able to explain what is going on today, or tell you what will happen tomorrow.
Steve Keen is Professor of Economics at Kingston University in London, and an Honorary Professor at University College London.
I wasn’t planning to announce this until next week, as it’s still not in stock on Amazon, and there are some pricing/discount issues that we have to resolve, but since I know some of you are checking out the Castalia Books Direct store and it’s as cheap to ship five comics as one, I figured I’d go ahead and make the print edition of Steve Keen’s economics comic book available to those who are interested today: eCONcomics: Taking the CON out of Economics.
Which, I will warn you, even in comic book form is challenging. On the other hand, it is indubitably a unique collector’s item from one of the great minds of economics. Imagine owning a first edition of Albert Einstein’s first comic book….
Anyhow, this is a larger 10×7 32-page book that we did not originally plan on selling anywhere but through Amazon and the chain stores – the comic stores are hardly going to carry a highly esoteric educational one-off – so we set a low retail price and a low discount. The problem is that this means the $4.99 price on the Castalia Direct store is actually higher than the $3.99 retail price. We will resolve that somehow, but whether it involves raising the retail price and the discount or something else, I simply don’t know. So, if you very understandably would prefer to wait for the retail price, it should be on Amazon by the end of the next week. While it is being published by Castalia, for the time being I put it in the Arkhaven collection on the store for simplicity’s sake. You can even pick up a copy of Steve’s Can We Avoid Another Financial Crisis? while you’re there.
Also, a reader who is a former comic book store guy had an idea for how we could produce limited collector’s editions to benefit the early supporters. He suggested that we do something to signify the first X number of copies printed, such as a gold Arkhaven logo or whatever, as this would potentially increase their value to collectors down the road. While I’m not interested in playing the variant covers game, or charging people more for mirrored reflective holographic covers, something like this that doesn’t cost the reader any more and simply rewards those who were the first to support our new comics strikes me as a win-win situation.
So, is this of any interest to the collectors in our midst, and if it is, what should X be? Our goal is to eventually hit average issue sales of at least 50,000, so keep in mind that we probably want to establish a limited edition base that we will not change in the future. Also keep in mind that it costs us both time and money to make this change on every single comic, not much, but enough that we don’t want to do it for 50 or 100 comics. My thought is that something in the range between 500 and 5,000 would be about right, but I will defer to the wisdom of the enthusiasts.
And finally, how would you like us to signify these collector’s editions? The aforementioned gold logo, distinctive yet tasteful? A giant garish COLLECTOR’S EDITION stamp? Share your thoughts.