Speaker for the butthurt

Matt Walsh rage-quits the Republican Party because Donald Trump has won the nomination:

Goodbye, Republican Party.

I mean that in more ways than one. I’m leaving. You’re dying. I could stick around while you gasp your last pitiful breaths, but what would be the point? I’m certainly more pro-life than you ever were, but when it comes to political parties that have been overtaken by some kind of unintelligible, socially liberal populism, I say pull the plug.

Good riddance. Your wounds are self-inflicted anyway. Clearly you have no desire to live. So goodbye. I am abandoning you on your deathbed, and I feel no shame in it….

The Republican Party is host to many millions of people who fell prostrate before a flamboyant charlatan, despite, or perhaps even because of, his compulsive dishonesty, his moral cowardice, his cruelty and pettiness, his blatant and unapologetic ignorance and disinterest in the most important issues facing our country, his liberalism and so on. As Trump said himself, he could shoot someone in the middle of the street and these people would still follow him.

That’s why I’m leaving. It’s also why you’re dying. It’s not my fault, and it’s not even Trump’s fault. Trump is just a parasite who took advantage of a weakened immune system. He’s the violent case of dysentery that finally kills the frail man who was already sick with a thousand other exotic diseases. The untrained eye may say the man died because he was vomiting blood, but in truth he was vomiting blood because he was dying.

The Republican Party, we should remember, is made up of Republicans. And most of the Republicans are voters, not politicians. So even if nobody else will say it, I must make it clear that I’m leaving because of these voters. Whatever else can be said of citizens who want a man like Trump to run the country, it cannot be said that they’re anything resembling conservative. Nor can it be said that we have anything much in common.

Yesterday, a Republican in Indiana told the media she’s voting for Trump because he’s a “different kind of liar.” The day before, Cruz attempted to have a reasoned dialogue with a couple of Trump supporters who responded to all of the senator’s arguments by shouting slogans and pumping their fists. Trump fans perform even less admirably in cyberspace, where an impassioned collection of anti-Semites and white nationalists work tirelessly to confirm every negative and cartoonish stereotype liberals have ever concocted about Republicans.

I’m not saying they’re all like this, but I’m done answering for the antics and inanities of the Trump squad. They’re not in my party. Or, I suppose they’d respond, I’m not in theirs. And they’re right.

Remind Matt of this every single time he claims to be a Republican in the future. Rub it in Matt’s face every single time he claims to speak for Republicans. Remind Matt that he quit, that he very publicly left the party, when he claims to be its true voice.

Because, if there is one thing we have learned about gammas like Matt, it is that they always try to come back and pretend nothing happened.

The only thing that is more pathetic than Matt’s gamma rage is the losers in his comments encouraging him to self-immolate.

Will there be war?

In which Stefan Molyneux and I discuss what appears to be looming on the not-so-distant horizon.

We were having some serious Skype issues, so I was forced to use a laptop with a camera, hence the poor video quality. On the plus side, the audio is better this time. Hopefully everything will come together by the third try.

If you wish to download the MP3 instead, you can do so here.

Sexism at the Locus Awards

The SF SJWS are up in arms about sexism at the Locus Awards:

Renay, The Cabal ‎@renay
Surprise, welcome to Systemic Sexism, Locus Awards edition!!

Stephanie A. Allen ‏@stephandrea_
I guess I didn’t get the memo that female YA writers don’t write SFF

Martha Brockenbrough ‎@mbrockenbrough
Hey, if you read LOCUS, don’t worry: women do actually write fantasy and science fiction, even if they didn’t make any awards lists.

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
To clarify my earlier tweet about LOCUS’s finalists. No books by women made the list in the YA category. This defies belief.

 No wonder they’re upset:

FANTASY NOVEL

    Karen Memory, Elizabeth Bear (Tor)
    The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard (Roc; Gollancz)
    Wylding Hall, Elizabeth Hand (PS; Open Road)
    The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
    Uprooted, Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

Wait, what? Oh, sorry, apparently this is the problem.

YOUNG ADULT BOOK

    Half a War, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey; Harper Voyager UK)
    Half the World, Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey)
    Harrison Squared, Daryl Gregory (Tor)
    Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older (Levine)
    The Shepherd’s Crown, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)

For feminists, “sexism” means that somewhere, somehow, a man still has something that a woman thinks she should have.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
 You’re obviously forgetting that Joe Abercrombie identifies as a woman now. So much hate! You should be ashamed!

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
Is this a joke? Because I am not getting it.

Supreme Dark Lord ‏@voxday
I just think you’re being very insensitive and hateful to Ms Abercrombie. Not all women have vaginas, you know.

Martha Brockenbrough ‏@mbrockenbrough
First I have heard that Joe Abercrombie identifies as a woman. If she does, that changes things. 

And to think they say SJWs are no fun!

The refusal to learn

The New York Times is aghast at Donald Trump’s challenge to the bifactional ruling party:

This is a moment of reckoning for the Republican Party. It’s incumbent on its leadership to account for the failures and betrayals that led to this, and find a better way to address them than the demagogy on offer.

Republicans haven’t yet begun to grapple with this. Instead they’re falling into line.

Republican leaders have for years failed to think about much of anything beyond winning the next election. Year after year, the party’s candidates promised help for middle-class people who lost their homes, jobs and savings to recession, who lost limbs and well-being to war, and then did next to nothing. That Mr. Trump was able to enthrall voters by promising simply to “Make America Great Again” — but offering only xenophobic, isolationist or fantastical ideas — is testimony to how thoroughly they reject the politicians who betrayed them.

Now, myopic as ever, Republican leaders are talking themselves into supporting Mr. Trump. At a party retreat in Florida last month, Mr. Trump’s adviser Paul Manafort, brought in to make the candidate seem safer to the old guard, assured them that Mr. Trump will better prepare himself for the presidency. “That was all most of these guys needed to hear,” said an operative in the room. “Maybe he’s trainable.” But within a day, Mr. Trump was back to making vile comments at his rallies. In his confused foreign policy address, he demonstrated nothing but a willful refusal to learn.

Xenophobia and isolationism are to be vastly preferred to the treasonous fantasies of the Republican and Democratic politicians alike. There is nothing confusing about Trump’s foreign policy: what is hard to understand about America First for anyone who doesn’t have other objectives in mind?

If the Republican Party doesn’t fall in line behind Donald Trump, it might as well cease to exist and its members can go where they belong, to the ironically-named, anti-democratic Democratic Party.

And to all those conservatives and Republicans crying about how Trump is certain to lose to Clinton, ask yourself this: why doesn’t the great left-liberal standard sound a whole lot happier about Trump being the Republican nominee? Do they sound like people who are confident of victory?

Let’s hope Donald Trump continues to refuse to learn from the USA’s failed, anti-American political class.

The Indiana KO

The Indiana primary should be enough to put an end to Cruz’s campaign, but we’ll have to wait and see if he comes to his senses yet. The shrieking, crying, and dire predictions from the conservative media bodes well for Trump.

UPDATE: “TRUMP WINS INDIANA IN LANDSLIDE…”

54% Trump
34% Cruz
09% Kasich

That will do it. Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee.

UPDATE 2: Note the name of the post. Cruz is out. The GOP establishment has been officially, and conclusively, Trumped.

Ted Cruz is quitting the presidential race, according to campaign manager Jeff Roe, ending one of the best-organized campaigns of 2016 after a series of stinging defeats left Donald Trump as the only candidate capable of clinching the nomination outright.

Cruz had appeared likely to go all the way to the Republican convention, but a string of massive losses in the Northeast, and his subsequent defeat in Indiana, appear to have convinced him there’s no way forward.

Vegetable totalitarians

Don’t feel bad about cutting a vegan out of your life if he ceases to mind his own business and starts preaching. They’re an SJW cult, they’re not just people who happen to prefer to different food.

L.A.’s vegan vortex has angrily turned on the most prominent vegan restaurant group in town this week as word has spread that its owners are not just eating meat but raising and slaughtering animals at the working farm where they live in Northern California.

Matthew and Terces Engelhart, the husband-and-wife proprietors of favored entertainment industry haunt Cafe Gratitude, tell The Hollywood Reporter they’ve been receiving death threats as part of a quickly growing, internet-bred campaign against them. It has also spawned a deluge of one-star reviews on their local outposts’ respective Yelp pages, a boycott group on Facebook that tallies 571 members at press time and plans now underway for a protest at the Larchmont Village location on Friday at 7 p.m.

“People have taken up the mob mentality,” says Matthew. “It saddens me that the choices we made in the privacy of our home would lead people to feel so betrayed that it’s elevated to threats on our lives. I’m very discouraged.”

The trouble began last week when animal rights activists discovered and then widely circulated a 14-month-old blog post written by Terces on the Engelharts’ Be Love Farm website, which mixed an announcement of their transition back into a meat diet again after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism (they had been vegan since 2003) with posted pictures of strained beef broth and a freezer full of pastured beef from their own dairy cows. Matthew tells THR they have kept chickens on the farm for seven years “for eggs only,” along with the cows for five years for milk, cheese and butter that’s for sale. (He claims they’ve “harvested,” or slaughtered, several cows in total and never sold the meat, only shared it with “our friends, neighbors and community.”)

The news has come as a shock to many vegans, who have been regular customers of the restaurants and claim the Engelharts have built their brand on not just serving vegan food but clearly wrapping themselves in the righteousness of the vegan cause — which they argue has now been undermined. “The reason we’re so upset is that veganism is a belief system,” says Carrie Christianson, who started the Facebook boycott group. “You are patronizing a restaurant that you think has that philosophy, and it turns out it doesn’t. Vegans should know that this restaurant has a farm that slaughters animals.”

“Veganism is a belief system.” That’s really all you need to know. It’s a secular religion. Since you are what to eat, my belief system says vegans are vegetables and should be treated accordingly.

Grow or Die paperback

We are pleased to be able to announce that the bestselling survival gardening book, GROW OR DIE: The Good Guide to Survival Gardening, is now available in paperback for $11.99. While we are massive proponents of ebooks, this is arguably the one book that you will definitely want to own in a physical format.

While I can’t be certain that Kindles will not function properly in the post-Apocalypse, it’s probably not the safe bet.

For some reason, Amazon has elected to confer upon David the title of Assistant Professor Psychology and Applied Therapies, so I’m sure you will all join me in congratulating him upon this unexpected academic achievement.

Because it’s worked so well so far

The Secret Masters of Fandom are retreating to what appears to be the science fiction community’s one and only tactic even before they see the effects of their first round of rules changes. From a Facebook discussion:

Kevin Standlee
A factor regarding invoking the convention Code of Conduct against Griefers (I’m looking at Christopher J Garcia and Sean Wallace in particular) and disqualifying their ballots and revoking their memberships that only came to me this morning:

The current Worldcon in Kansas City does have the right to regulate its own membership. They could, if they so choose, decide to revoke the memberships of individuals for just about any reasons unless it was prohibited by law. So in theory they could revoke the memberships of individual members who they believed were violating their Code of Conduct by the way they cast their Hugo Award nominating ballots.

However, what about the members of the Spokane and Helsinki Worldcons? All of their members as of January 31, 2016 were also eligible to nominate. Kansas City is obliged to honor those nominations as part of the WSFS Constitution, which is the “contract” under which MidAmeriCon II was granted the right to hold the 2016 Worldcon. MAC2 does not have jurisdiction over the memberships of the 2015 and 2017 Worldcons. They don’t have the right to revoke the memberships of members of either of those two conventions. If, as seems likely to me, most of the Griefers are coasting along on the memberships they bought to Sasquan, MAC2 doesn’t seem to me to have the right to ignore those persons’ votes — not unless they could somehow get the legal remnant of the 2015 Worldcon committee to revoke those persons’ memberships.

Yes, I know I’m being legalistic. That’s what I do. Throwing out the rule of law just because you don’t like how some people voted is IMO giving the Griefers exactly what they want — a plausible legal excuse to hammer the Hugo Awards and Worldcon with. They’re trying to goad us into an extra-legal response.

David Dyer-Bennet
Lacking the Arisians to identify and certify a reliable supply of “philosopher kings”, I think rule of law is our best choice, however annoying some of the intermediate steps may be.

Christopher J Garcia
It’s not about the votes – it’s about the use of the Hugos as a platform for a hate group..

Kevin Standlee
You’d need to withdraw the nominating rights from the previous/subsequent years’ members in order to give a single legal entity (the current Worldcon) the right to revoke the memberships (and thus not count the ballots) of the people you consider unworthy of voting, for whatever reason, including being part of what you’ve decided is a hate group.

Christopher J Garcia
It’s not about the voting. It’s allowing members of a hate group (and the Rabid Puppies qualify as such under the SPLC, ADL, and FBI definitions) to opperate within the awards. We are implicitly accepting their presence by not acting to remove them.

Kevin Standlee
No. You are only a member of WSFS for the current “Worldcon Year,” which runs from end of Worldcon to end of Worldcon. There are, however, residual rights that attach to past and future Worldcons of which you may be a member.

Kevin Standlee
I don’t dispute that there is a de facto hate group acting here. What I’m saying is that while an individual Worldcon may choose to revoke the memberships of its members for any non-prohibited-by-law reason, they cannot IMO legally revoke. Incidentally, one of the “residual rights” is to inspect the accounts of the Worldcon of which you were a member. The “sunshine clause” is rarely invoked, but it is in there.

Christopher Carson
It’s not about the votes, it’s not about the nominations — so you’re mad at an abstract concept?

Michael Lee
I could make the case that the code of conduct applies to all participants in an activity of a particular convention, and that the nomination phase is an activity not of three conventions, but of one particular convention, so that individual convention’s code of conduct would apply. And it is the responsibility of an individual convention to administer the Hugo Awards.

Kevin Standlee
Michael Lee I can see your point; however, I can also see that if I were a member of the previous Worldcon who had my vote tossed by the current Worldcon, I would have standing to sue to the current Worldcon for failing to abide by the terms of their contract (the WSFS Constitution).

Kevin Standlee
Codes of conduct aren’t mentioned in the WSFS Constitution, so it’s unclear just how much any one convention’s CoC can have jurisdiction over another convention’s members. In particular, look at this section of the WSFS Constitution:

Section 1.6: Authority. Authority and responsibility for all matters concerning the Worldcon, except those reserved herein to WSFS, shall rest with the Worldcon Committee, which shall act in its own name and not in that of WSFS. And that seems to me to give a Worldcon to regulate its own members, but not any other convention’s members.

Linda Deneroff
I thought well prior to 2012 the WSFS Constitution permitted the prior year’s worldcon members to nominate, but back before computers it was nearly impossible to make it practical or viable.

Kevin Standlee
Prior years’ members have been eligible to nominate since 1989. The subsequent year’s members were only extended the nominating privilege effective in 2012 (ratified in 2011).

Christopher Hensley
Which is why I am a little miffed at Sasquan. They actually had the power to do it, but they did not.

Linda Deneroff
20-20 hindsight is wonderful.

Christopher Hensley
To be fair, they are doing exactly what they said they would do since the nominating period opened last year.

Aaron Kashtan
Wouldn’t it be better to create a rule that the current Worldcon can, at its discretion, reject any Hugo nominee that threatens to bring the Hugos or Worldcon into disrepute? Like the rule that caused the rejection of the name Boaty McBoatface? I’m sure this idea has been suggested before.

Kevin Standlee
Such a rule would be legal, but it does not currently exist. And beware of rules that can be turned against you. However, if you want help crafting such a rule, contact me directly and I’ll help you write it. Convincing two consecutive WSFS Business Meetings to vote for it would be your problem.

Richard Man
 I think any NEW rule, would not help for 2016 (and of course not 2015) due to the ratification requirements. I think the WSFS charter founders are pretty crafty in makes things fairly democratic, within the limits of the charters. They just never expected influential arseholes.

Christopher Carson
Pretty sure fandom has never been short of “influential arseholes”.

Richard Man
… but ones that screw up the Hugos two years in a year ;-P?

Kevin Standlee
WSFS rules are designed with an assumption that people will act in good faith.

I’ve repeatedly said that WSFS operates much like the USA did for the first twenty years after it declared independence. The manifest flaws of the Articles of Confederation led to the adoption of the current much-stronger Constitution of 1787. But it took several years for that to happen, too, and the challenges facing the young USA were a lot worse than a bunch of bad actors trolling a literary award.

Dave O’Neill
I don’t think anybody expected any of the individual arseholes to actually have followers.

Kevin Standlee
True. And most of the individuals within Worldcon-attending fandom have been prepared to play within the _spirit_ of the rules as well as its letter. Heck, there were a couple of “puppy” sympathizers at the 2015 WSFS Business Meeting.

Dave O’Neill
I can assure you that his motion would have failed. There was no way it was going through. But yes, I recall him well. I also recall all the people of the opinion that this was a ‘one off’ and we shouldn’t do anything as they’ll get bored.

Kevin Standlee
That was only the second time that I’ve seen Adjourn moved in its debatable form in any situation other than routinely at the end of a day or of the session. The first time was when I made it myself many years ago (L.A. con III, as I recall) because I thought the people present didn’t want to go in to the nitty-gritty of a complex report I was presenting and wanted to put it off until the next day. I was wrong.

Mike Glyer
This kind of tortured logic undermines the much needed benefits of Codes of Conduct. Beware.

Christopher Hensley
The move away from a pure legalistic approach represents a major shift in the community over the last few years.

Kevin Standlee
Understood about the beware. Any committee wanting to invoke their Code of Conduct in this situation would have to consider balancing the harm done to itself by Griefers against the potential harm of dealing with a lawsuit from them.

Christopher Hensley
I also worry about the opposite. That they will try to nominate a work that while protected by the absolute speech protections inherent in US will run afoul libel or hate crime laws outside of it. If nothing else it would kill the packet, or require saying “we refuse to distribute this”. Possibly even cause problems with advertising the finalists. A certain title which make accusations about John Scalzi come to mind.

Kevin Standlee
Funny thing, that. Imagine such a case next year, in which Finnish and EU law applies. IMO, the committee would be totally justified in disqualifying such a work, because local law always trumps the WSFS Constitution.

Mike Glyer
It’s reasonable to anticipate that they will keep moving down the continuum, finding more transgressive works to nominate. They would do it anyway, and if EPH is effective in limiting their impact, would want to devote the slots they get to items that …

Kevin Standlee
Me, too, and it was one of the reasons I didn’t like trying to invoke it as a legitimate reason to disqualify nominations, members, or finalists.

Christopher Hensley
There are two questions in my mind. One are their actions, which are clearly an ongoing campaign of harassment. The other is the works themselves. It should be a much higher bar on that but not an impossible one. What happens when they nominate non-fiction works which promote violence against LGBT persons, racial minorities or Muslims?

Dave O’Neill
Surely the administrators have some wiggle room in those situations? If not then there does need to be a disrepute clause brought in.

Kevin Standlee
I don’t really see much room for maneuver by the Administrators. Every individual natural person is eligible to become a member by existing rules.

Dave O’Neill
I was thinking more if somebody nominated a hardcore porn SF parody or similar? Rather than dealing with members – I was under the impression the administrators had the final word in eligibility?

Christopher Hensley
Tingle’s stuff is more performance art then porn parody. He has a following that loves his over the top antics and hopelessly positive message. But yes, Tingle is absolutely backfiring on Day. He’ll say it was his plan all along but it is stealing his spotlight.

Dave O’Neill
well, I wasn’t actually thinking of Tingle then as, yes, it’s part of a gag. I was thinking more of a “Game of Boners” type stuff.

Mem Morman
What’s a “Griefer”?

Kevin Standlee
The people wanting to destroy the Hugo Awards by nominating a slate that includes a fair number of obviously awful things. In effect, the Rabid Puppies.

Dave O’Neill
Somebody who deliberately tries to spoil things for other players.

Dave O’Neill
Although I really think the Chuck Tingle thing is going to backfire spectacularly on Ted.

Christopher Hensley
“Griefing” originally a video gaming term referring to players who kill their own teammates in multiplayer.

Kevin Standlee
I like how it can be easily mistaken as Grifters, which seems appropriate to me given their Sooper Genius Evil Overlord.

Alfred Kruse
“And so it begins…”

Covert J Beach
I would consider canceling memberships based on nominations for the Hugo to be the Nuclear Option. I think this becomes a slippery slope to the point where the Cure will be worse than the Disease. This idea is another version of Strong Administrator, and should be invoked as a last resort and only in desperation. In theory bad ideas should be trampled in the free marketplace of ideas. The Griefers as you refer to them have found a mechanical way to make the marketplace less free (by packing the limited number of nominations.) Even if we can agree that this group needs to be dealt with, there comes the future time where someone with a hot button gets to make a well intentioned call that blows up in the convention’s face. The solution is to free up the marketplace of ideas. EPH+6/4 or Semi-final voting do this.

What I find so interesting about the SJW-SF reaction is that they simply never stop to question their basic assumptions or the effectiveness of their tactics. This all started when Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, appropos of a single syndicated op/ed column about Susan Estrich’s attack on Michael Kinsley, broached the possibility excluding me from the Nebula jury back in 2005. Then Patrick Nielsen Hayden and John Scalzi joined forces to force the SFWA Board to exclude me in 2013 by threatening to quit, after which the Hugo voters did their best to exclude me in 2014.

How has that worked out for them?

The SJWs in science fiction couldn’t imagine that we would take over the 2015 nominations. They were highly confident that we couldn’t dominate the nominations this year. And I have no doubt that they are absolutely certain we can’t possibly take over the Business Meeting.

Want to bet the Hugo Awards on that?

Go ahead, Secret Masters, make a special rule aimed at me and the Rabid Puppies a legitimate tactic at my disposal if you dare. This is your fair warning.

Brainstorm with Steve Keen

I am very pleased to be able to say that on Friday, May 6th, at 7 PM Eastern, we will be holding an Open Brainstorm with the most important economist working today, Dr. Steve Keen. Dr. Keen is the author of Debunking Economics, which is a work so fundamentally revolutionary that its implications will probably not be fully understood for at least another century.

He is the leading Post-Keynesian economist and he is one of the very few economists to have correctly anticipated both the 2008 financial crisis as well as what he describes as the Second Great Depression. (He is, of course, completely wrong; the correct term is Great Depression 2.0.) I will post an open registration link tomorrow after the Brainstorm members have had the chance to get their seats first, as I expect this will be a well-attended event. Invites to members will go out this evening along with a transcript of the recent William S. Lind event.

For those who attended the Lind event, I spoke with my ISP and it turned out there was a software-related problem in my connection on their end; they have fixed it and I don’t anticipate any further problems. But we will have a backup plan in place just in case similar problems present themselves.

Below is my 2012 review of Debunking Economics.

Stalking the Undead Economist

Since being presented with a copy of Milton Friedman’s “Free To Choose” as a schoolboy, I have read a considerable quantity of books devoted to economics. Unlike most socialists, I have read Marx, Veblen and Bakunin. Unlike most monetarists, I have read more than Friedman’s pop books focused on the mass audience, but his more scholarly works, too, as well as his massive ode to monetary policy, coauthored with Anna Jacobson Schwartz, titled, “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960.” Unlike most neo-Keynesians, I have read both “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” as well as Paul Samuelson’s landmark textbook, “Economics,” in its original 1948 edition. Unlike most free traders, I have read David Ricardo’s “The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation,” and while unlike most Austrians, I cannot quote chapter and verse of Ludwig von Mises’ “Human Action” from memory, I have read it.

I have no doubt this reading list would have astonished the late professor of my macroeconomics class, who was less bothered by my usual failure to attend class than by the fact that I never bothered to buy the textbook.

After nearly three decades of reading across a broad spectrum of economic thought, the two books on the subject I would most recommend are Joseph Schumpeter’s “History of Economic Analysis” and Murray Rothbard’s “An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought.” But now there is a third. After finishing “Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?” I have to assert that Keen’s book is not only an absolute masterpiece, but may, in fact, represent the most important intellectual development in economics since “The General Theory” was published in 1936. And if some of Keen’s more controversial assertions hold up over time, it will be the most important contribution to the literature since “The Wealth of Nations.”

The title of the book is an appropriate one because Keen calls into very serious question some of the most basic assumptions that economists of all ideological strains have shared since 1776. This is not a book for the faint of heart, not due to the relatively sophisticated mathematics he utilizes in support of his arguments, but because it will be hard for anyone with even a modicum of education in economics to accept intrinsically revolutionary ideas such as the non-linear shape of a market demand curve or to believe that conventional economic models are absolutely reliant upon absurdities such as markets that consist of one solitary customer for a single commodity. And while it is one thing to notice that the conventional models don’t take into account factors such as time and debt (for I have written about these things myself), it is still eye-opening to witness Keen methodically explore the significance of such omissions and explicate the consequences of how these structural errors render the entire mainstream discipline fundamentally incapable of coherently describing, let alone predicting, economic activity in the real world.

Perhaps the most revelatory section of the book deals with the way the General Theory of John Maynard Keynes was converted into the practical neoclassical form that presently dominates mainstream economics in its two halves, Monetarist and Neo-Keynesian, by Paul Samuelson and J.R. Hicks. While it is no secret that Samuelson quantified many of the concepts introduced by Keynes, as one will search “The General Theory” in vain for gross domestic product or any of the macroeconomic terms that are so familiar today, I had always wondered about the basis for the IS/LM model that played such a central role in my macroeconomic class could be found in Keynes; none of my economics professors ever pointed out that it was provided in what was essentially a book review of Keynes’s magnum opus or admitted how this core function of “Keynesian” economics inherently contradicted what Keynes himself wrote.

Throughout the book, Keen proves himself to be an engaging writer who is able to break down and explain the most complex concepts in a manner that most interested readers will be able to follow without too much trouble. He wisely structures his arguments in such a way that if one does not wish to wrestle with the math or the more esoteric aspects of the subject, one can still understand the significance of the point that he is making and move on to the next issue.

One need not agree with all of Keen’s arguments or his conclusions to admire the serious and substantive challenge that he has posed here to neoclassical economics. The neoclassicals cannot ignore the divergence between their theories and the real world forever, and no amount of revisionist history from the likes of Brad DeLong will permit them to do so much longer in a world that is drowning in excessive public and private debt. If Keen convinces the reader of just one thing, it is that there is a dire need for a better economics. Consider the following statement in which he compares five alternative schools of economics, Austrian, Post-Keynesian, Sraffian, Econophysics and Evolutionary economics prior to describing the strengths and weaknesses of each:

“None of these is at present strong enough or complete enough to declare itself a contender for the title of ‘the’ economic theory of the twenty-first century. However, they all have strengths in areas where neoclassical economics is fundamentally flawed, and there is also a substantial degree of overlap and cross-fertilization between schools. It is possible that this century could finally see the development of a dominant economic theory which actually has some relevance to the dynamics of a modern capitalist economy. I would probably be regarded as partisan to the post-Keynesian approach. However, I can see varying degrees of merit in all five schools of thought, and I can imagine that a twenty-first-century economics could be a melange of all five.”

As can be seen by this quote, Keen is not a polemicist bent on defending his perspective, but a fair-minded inquirer after the truth. He may never be known as the father of whatever the future mainstream of economics turns out to be, but in driving this stake of a book through the heart of what can be reasonably characterized as the undead theory of neoclassical economics, he could rightly merit being described as its midwife.