Ye Olde Natural Philosophy Discussion Group

Reviews and comments on
Steve Keen: "Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor of the Social Sciences" [2001]

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Rarity of rarities, our group had an almost uniform appraisal of this book, and that appraisal was uniformly positive. Everybody gave it either a 7 or 8 on a scale of 1 to 10, for an average of 7.8.

We felt this was a hard book and takes some work to get through. But we all also felt that the effort was well worth it. Many of the members of our group had not read any books on economics before, and were very interested to find out just how foolish the dominant school of contemporary economics really is. We agreed that Keen does an excellent job of truly debunking neoclassical economics. Everybody remarked that they were really glad they read this book.

Although the book concentrates almost entirely on exposing neoclassical economics, it also has one chapter which criticizes Marxist economics—at least as it is defended by many Marxist economists. Our resident Marxist (Scott) surprised a couple people when he said he agreed with the thrust of Keen's central criticism of Marx's version of the labor theory of value, but perhaps surprised them again when he said that in his view that by no means debunked Marxist economics. Scott wrote a fairly long review/essay of Keen's book, focusing on the chapter on Marxist economics and the LTV.



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