we're very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning steve keen steve keen is professor of economics and finance at the university of western sydney in australia in two thousand and ten he won the revere award from the real world economics review for being the economist who most cogently warned that the economic crisis that began in two thousand and seven was imminent he is a staunch critic of mainstream economic thinking and author of the book debunking economics the n treasurer and prime minister at one stage but gave me a brilliant vision of economics as a dynamic process i'm talking about as the tappan that the most influential thing was a theory of economic growth which is the sokal theory of growth and that got me addicted to economics  but not anti union anti monopoly arguments and it inverted the arguments you get about you know you should deregulate everything a senator said you had like a monopoly then you should also have tried unions to balance the boggling power and that was stunning result to may and i thought if it's that easy to have it's and and it looked like a strike for what conclusion of the theory there's got to be something wrong with the really because having having developed over time read the literature that i wasn't taught as an undergraduate because learning this particular flow which is called the theory the second best i then when looking through the academic literature reading the journals themselves rather than reading the textbooks and found there's an and tada byte for example one issue which was how do you define capital how do you measure capital and it was actually a battle in whether you can talk about an aggregate thing we might call and that sort of says that you can measure you know every extra worker who comes to work at the right produces a bit less output than the one before hand and you will end up receiving the wages of the very last person you decide to employ and that's where you are saving  they've got at the money amounts and then trying to say the money amounts to time in the amount of money they get back you've got the secularity that doesn't make any sense and this huge divide occurred in the literature between the university of cambridge predominately in england as the critics and critics who won and even full samuelson who was on that of defending the conventional theory he ended up effectively conceding the thing they look at the textbooks not ice skerrick that turned up in the textbooks and the whole range of other critiques like that that economics that hadn't been transmitted into the textbooks at all in fact that mean ignored and i thought this is just reprehensible it's mendacious not education it's mendacity and people being get snowed by economists we just don't understand this is you know why wages of what they are upset are etc and i knew that was garbage myself and i thought well i can write a book which is a god to why you shouldn't take economics seriously and that's when i came up with the banking economics and it was approach most academics to i me ended through school teaching overseas i journalism computer programming computer journalism journalism and finally realize that what i thought you'd be doing in economics wasn't happening i went back to university call that really is a tribute to kinds it was really his his vision of what i call the financial instability hypothesis and i'd read as well as waiting critiques of conventional theory and saying people trying to build an alternative in everything i've read before minsky didn't come other critics talked about capitalism having a tendency towards on the consumption which i didn't think was realistic and then i read minsky and i thought this guy's brought it all together a period of trying quilty what it tends to do is lead to people having rising expectations along with the tranquility goes on the more they forget the most recent process and therefore their expectations about the future ra's and then malaki to borrow money in ghana and speculate on a final economic process and that's the only had a verbal model of that and i thought it was brilliantly complete the model but he hadn't put it into a mathematical form so i set myself the tascam my ph d of making a mathematical model that hypothesis so instability is a good thing that's a good question because normally the way that neo classical economics talk about the economy instability is bad you know equilibrium is the wonderful state we being a bit like the fact that we don't win if a perfectly evolved towards the environment and we actually affect the environment so they fold is going to be a process of change and evolution and species and had exactly the same concepts apply in an economy so you'll never have a perfect fit to anything you will not have optimal anything and there's always be an opportunity to evolve and change but the evolution of change will then change the environment itself and you get this positive feedback the very successful venture capitalist to get his ph d at cambridge an instrument then went out into the commercial world and was very influential in developing a lot of the computer technology we take for granted these guys and bill just published a book on the  contract at the back of my brine his book is about the creative instability of capitalism and that foundation again is where i come from so a certain degree of instability is part of the creative force of capitalism but you don't want instability creative instability you also get the tendency for the financial sector to want to create as much debt as they can because by creating debt they create profit for themselves and rotting on top of this instability you can accumulate so much debt that you can't pay that debt and capitalism collapses not just individuals going bankrupt but the whole system going bankrupt so it's that instability you want to prevent cyclical behavior creative instability not a problem it's the financial sector sitting on top of one of the dangers of people working in economics and politics in general is they try to say i can design a bit of system the next you know and again having an evolutionary background of several acts is what we've got and when people try to devise a better system you end up with catastrophes unintended consequences coming out of those rages on so the whole idea of building socialism for example had a vision that capitalism was going to collapse  if i went back forty years time for example on your radio show and said we had this is the major corporation in computing is going to be a company called microsoft people would have being ranking up  twits down the road they're never going to be able to compete with the locks of i b m well they did and that that is a creative force in capitalism which in many ways takes advantage of the enhanced is that exploits that the trouble is as well as what some of the capitalist friends have said on various occasions that charges so they try to profit off their profits and socialize their losses and that's the real dilemma with capitalism because it works when you've got an  losses i'm sorry that destroys the planet as well so i'm a fan i am a proponent of capitalism is social system now is something like to say lots of capitalist innovation on the front of how do we society to constrain the waste and damage we do of it's on in capitalism it's it itself will have to evolve some would say we're heading towards a police state now at least in this country i'm not sure how much you follow on that but our civil liberties are shrinking as each day goes by yeah i mean it's it's america's got some weird twist to it i'm seeing america just as a capitalist nation i think forgets a whole lot of other trends that exist when you've got a you know radio station money wise  militaristic background the security paranoia that america has and also the vision it has it when it invades the rest of the world it's actually liberating it you know in the country that invites another country and says we're here to free you i'm sorry invading forces tai chi so i think the still affronted mentality in that in america that ends up with a lot of that police type behavior and it's ironic because you know you go to so i got the constitution of liberty and statements about freedom of speech and so on the only thing is there for you have freedom of guns you don't seem to have freedom of speech and that again that's the religious side of this country which again is quite unusual in my country the dominant religion is agnosticism i'm not when you do essentially a census of people who say what's your religion one of the choices is tick the box i don't know religion that's the dominant choice so america's drawn focus on religion is again is something which is unusual and you certainly are suffering incursions on civil liberties here i wouldn't say it's just the capital side of america that's to blame it's that other weird mixtures and you'll culture as well that a part of it so you talk about the current debt very little residual value in the house so they went after the house instead and we my my case was to try to get the judge to be willing to write off at least the last line contract and the only way you can really do that to convince a judge to agree to process the biggest in the dot a strain that i was looking at which went back forty is that stage and about two o'clock in the morning this is when i first got the daughter out and i thought i better check the american dot to see what that looks like and that gave me doubt about the not in fifty two when from fifty two to two thousand and five not and an extra liability on law and i get extra spending power without reducing anybody else's spending so that we have one person spending is their income plus the change in debt and because of this expansion of spending power by the banking sector aggregate demand is not just incumbents income plus the change in debt and i get accused of double counting by neoclassical economists and by some of my fellows in those kinds and economics i'm now going to reasonable group the now agree with me that it was trying to push this idea for myself michael about the order of ten eleven trillion dollars on the increase in debt that even private it was two trillion come forward when the cross was finally hit the g d p was about four change trillion and the increase in private it was another four trillion so the total amount of money spent at the economy wasn't just could so you had a debt finance been the whole subprime bubble was debt finance driven and then a debt driven collapse as well and that's what cools the bubble before the process that caused the crash as well out that's a major reason why the government deficit rose so the government deficit is a bit like in a conditioning system when it gets hot outside the air conditioning system comes on and when it gets called out sod it the air conditioning goes to warm and effectively that's what happen with government spending so if you look at the level of debt you can look at private debt and public debt everybody's obsessing about public debt approaching the level of jade a pay still isn't quite there so you've got to pay a baguette about fourteen fifteen trillion public  deliberate fashion and that's what causes the tendency to fall back into a collapse once more because a certain amount of debt fund spending is necessary in a capitalist economy if you look at corporations they finance themselves out of so if you just address the change in debt and perhaps like what they do with the islamic banking system charging interest would that solve the problem all this all in is also advise you to try to reform the actual financial system and stop the accumulation of debt and the real problem with had is that with exultant the financial sector particularly in america to being oh my god like status and because of the financial sector file blah blah blah you let it get too big and the financial sector takes risks far beyond the risks that they should tike they finance flip that they really should be providing finance for industrial capitalism and finish the story consumption by households and not much more than that and one of the good arguments about how to stop them going beyond that would be to bring troops remove the protection they get from limited deposit over that they can get away with an enormous increase in debts they don't have production costs constraining them and we go back in history banks weren't given limited liability it's only in recent history of the last century or so with done that and if you want to stop the banks doing that and being much more than just your dishes about what they do and don't invest all finance then bringing back unlimited liability for bankers might do it and so what i'd prefer to do is say let's have a modern day aaa in the past that you please read common pot in all societies we thought were too advanced into modern for those garbage we've got the biggest d and use that money that capacity to create money into the economy why the kool aid is not put that money in people's bank accounts and with the condition that if they're in debt they must pay the debt down but if they and then use that to reach through rebalance the economy to have more faith based money less credit buys money reduce the size of the financial sector reduce the level of debt in the economy by that action and do it in such a why the debt is now have more capacity to spend and save sign with alan before getting here we've made an enormous era and there's no painless way out of it the least painful why i think would be a ditch and sounds a lot better giving the money to the people and it is to the banks who then will perhaps give some of it back to the people you know this is the thing people to talk about q e is printing money it ain't printing money we're going to whacking the money in brown envelopes and lacking putting it in the mail to everybody it doesn't get to main street the only way that money can get into the system is actually through wall street in the banks actually buying shares off the public so i think th but it's trivial compared to the amount of money in q a did they did the second it's not getting to the public we needed to get we need to get it to the public to reduce the level of private debt well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming are very lucky to have with us live in the studio this morning show murphy sean murphy is co founder and executive director at the people's harm reduction alliance and in here to talk about his organization and the university district needle exchange so you start out tell us about the people's harm reduction alliance so the people's harmony excellence is a five hundred one c nonprofit our website is the people's home action or gee you go there to buy a t shirt we run a syringe exchange and our sort of just change is actually quite old at twenty four years  listeners don't know what a syringe exchange is it is a place where someone who uses injection drugs can go and get a clean syringe and why would they get a clean syringe because a in is dull after one use and so it can start doing damage to your veins and body and also because of blood you will have hiv and hepatitis c you can also get abscesses from using old needles and so in even eighty four in holland drug users figured out that if they give queen syringes they can help their friends from stopping the spread of have tightest be it wasn't a chevy it that time and researchers found that for some reason holland had the lowest rates in europe when they started researching that stuff and they realized it was connected to syringe exchange and in eighty eight a man dave purchase decided to start a syringe change in the great city of the coma got to be first for something hiv activist group started said they wanted to do want to downtown seattle and they invited many people to be a part of it one of which was named bob quinn and he was doing hospice care for hiv patients and he was tired of his people he loved and cared for dying and he decided something about it and they started the downtown needle exchange well he's not from downtown he was from the university district and if you knew bob quin he was a very loving caring person but also had a very snarky edge to him and if you told him he could not do something that was the one thing he was going to  do and the health department told him that there were no drug users in the university district the chamber of commerce told him there was no it wasn't feasible to do a syringe exchange in the university district and so he set up in from the old tower records which was across the street from the university bookstore next to the p c then table which is the times ill and activist group in the university district area most of the v ins started him fast and went on to work with him fest for many many years and so he set up certain change he walked around for about six months to eight months  asking people if they needed syringes to find out if there was actually a need there and there was and his table started in the first year he gave out four hundred fifty syringes and today gives out three million syringes the largest directors on our staff on as volunteers so yeah that's a brief history we've gone through lots of different changes came about when the public health department tried to shut down each service and therefore there was no one running the universities are you know she age and myself jeff corey and tom fitzpatrick all were staff at  strange and decided to do something to save our program and we did it and everyone would tell you reasons why you cannot do something and very few people would tell you reasons you can do something and the programs that are the ones that are done by people who won't take no for an answer and follow their hearts and find the hills they intend to die on and create long sustainable programs give their lives just a little better place and yeah that's my short answer how did you get involved with the needle exchange well was sorry i was a someone who used a certain change and i would come and get syringes from bob quinn when he ran it and they asked if there was any volunteer options because i was tired of my friends dying of overdoses and i saw the stigma and oppression people had towards drug users and homeless people and i wasn't going to take it anymore and so i asked all the nonprofits in the neighborhood if i could volunteer and all of them laughed at me say we're not going to take a homeless drug addict why would we take you you're worthless to us and bob quinn said yeah you got to show up at five o'clock hour five o'clock on wednesday and you can volunteer and i was so excited sheriff five i did my shift and shift i came back i came back  fifteen minutes late and he said no no you could misunderstood what i was saying i said five o'clock not five fifteen five o'clock and it became like the big you know is one of the big response of the first responsibilities i had my life and it changed my life and he kind of slow it off to me is his son and he was he's like a father to me and it broke our hearts when he passed away on november fo because it itself saved me not just the health prevention services that it provided but the fact that it told me that i was a loved and told me that i was cared for when so there is so much other stigma around drug use talk about some of the hurdles that drug users have to deal with that your organization of some overcome well  what one of the things about the drug war is it has declared war on my population and a lot of countries have a hard time dealing with this there are more homogenized countries that have a much more difficult problem demonizing the segment of its population in our country we seem to be ok with demonizing populations we have racism we have homophobia we have sexism we are either that you're evil or you have to quit today and in the new no change we tell them that they're loved and that they should be proud of who they are today and they should always be able to look in the mirror and say i am i love this person and i'm proud of this person and it sounds very happy but it's incredibly important to someone who is told how evil in discussing they are each and every day to be told that their loved and we have people come and they burst into tears and we tell them they're loved because no one has told them that and we give them hugs and we inform the members and they are the experts within their community that can provide a deep we needed service we have always felt that each community should find able to decide its own destiny its own services  and you know we as drug users are going to take care of our drug using brothers and sisters and so i always feel that that is the most important service that we do we do lots of other things that are incredibly important but telling drug users that they're human beings and that we love them and that their life is not worthless and their life is worth something in fact it's a precious life that you know i my heart breaks every time a drug user dies because we've lost a community member and we've lost a great asset to our neighborhood in the university district so i guess that is one of the things that people can come and you know parents ask me all the time what do you do when my son tells me that they're drug user i respond that you tell them that they are loved and that you love them and if you have a truly honest dialogue with someone about their drug use people change their behavior naturally if it brings in a few with their lies to change their ham havior and not all drug users are addicts not to say there are not some drug users who end up to be addicts the vast majority of drug users use once and never use again or use in the weekends or you know use once a month and there's many different drugs so about smoking cocaine even though it's the same drug has different statements on it injecting is no different there are people who just once and in depth having a long struggle to life with addiction there is people who inject once and say wow that's really not for me i don't know why people use that so i think it's really complicated and this is totally a tangent and i will go into the drug war i really believe has hurt our society in a very dramatic way i am a drug user i grew up in the streets of the u district i consider myself a huge issue a community member i'm very proud of the neighborhood i've come from i think leadership is the best neighborhood in the world and i have witnessed hundreds if not thousands of violent crimes and i am unlikely to have ever called the police department on that because i have been so abused by them i have been told i'm evil i have been thrown up against the wall to be searched because of drugs and so when i witness of a crime the police officers are not the people i call because i don't consider them allies and friends to my community no how does that help me it doesn't really help me and it doesn't really help the police department either because in all the research they've done they've shown that twenty percent of life on criminals or people who do criminal acts commit eighty percent of the violent crimes so a small portion of people who are even committing breaking the law are actually committing  crimes and you want those people who are consistently going to you do violent crimes to see a jail cell and how is that going to help when you have any needed a portion of your community in fact even if the portion of community this is most and typically most impoverished and the ones that are on the street corner at all times who have the eyes and ears who don't want to see violence but what are they going to do the police are going to help them with the ones who harass them so how does that help the university district if you're a war how is that made the neighborhood a better place and i'm not saying there are not problems with drugs but dealing with it as a health issue and dealing with it as people of the small percentage of people who commit crimes to get drugs that can be dealt with through people getting arrested for commune those crimes but dealing with the simple possession of drugs of a homeless person doesn't help the neighborhood in fact that makes animosity in the neighborhood and that puts wedges in the neighborhood and so i would say my neighborhood is a less safe because of the drug war more safe talk about the urban survivors union and how that relates to the drug war so the urban survivors union is a collection of drug users who forms their own union and it   like a bureaucratic system we were going to have we're going to be a human rights organization for drug users that happens to do health prevention and that's a big sea change  so we decided that we were going to do this great service and do all of this you know changing the laws and you know doing rallies and we realized that direct service robot this down and it involved a neighbor we just did a really good direct service and that's what we did well and so our question of us decided to for the urban survivors union which wasn't going to be entirely an organization designate to any of the drug war through education and  by pacifically involving drug users and print drug users in the helm of the civil rights movement gay rights would have not happened if you had a whole bunch of straight folks saying that we think gay people should have equal rights it happened because gay men and women fought for their own individual rights came out of the cause and said i'm gay and i'm proud and i'm not going anywhere it's the same concept we had of the  people need to come out and say hey i'm a drug user and i'm not afraid of it and i'm not an evil person for example i co founded the evans or i was union and i'm a drug user and i'm an executive director of a nonprofit and i live  on productive life in fact i challenge people to be more of a workaholic than i am so i know the drugs have actually bettered my my life not made it worse  we have general meetings and thursday the first and third thursday of the month in the university temple methodist church at the exchange office and we have different projects and  drug users because they can not only run their service but they can run their own lobby force now if you are having an opiate overdose you can take nor can likely someone's going to be giving it to you because of your chewing overdose your capacity to give your kid yourself and someone can give nine minutes and you can still overdose again once it wears off so you always have to kind of watch the person and we give ou and our program in the uterus shirt and it's behind the post office of the district and we're open tuesday and thursday five seven and friday and sunday one to five and the post office on forty third university w anyone wanted to know and you can get this substance to stop your overdose and when we start hanging out i kind of burst into tears because i knew so many people who died of overdose so many people i grew up on the streets are gone because of overdose and now we have the means of life saving medicine cost one dollar so my question is is your is a life worth one dollar is that's all it takes to save a life and stigma is killing drug users because people are using alone in their house because they're afraid to tell their neighbors or their friends and so when someone tells you they're drug user especially opiate user you have the means to save their lives and you have to decide if you want them to live or die because you they need someone to be with them when they use so it's really powerful and we organization so it's like this wonder drug it is and it has no real side effects the other side has ever read was if you had taken over ten doses and you don't want to take ten doses because they would make you really really sick so so this is something that people king can get through your organization yes you get to argos ation and you can it only takes it's like a two minute training and you can have your own narcan kit you can leave in your bathroom always have on you i think everyone should have it it's super easy to use it just once you see injection yeah so it does require a needle to be able to give it to someone so it does it and we provide those needles it also is light sensitive so you have to keep it in the black bag yeah and y ou mention that your talk this is something that you first see in everybody's medicine cabinet as well as like organizations yeah i feel if you is always there given  opiates everyone should have it it should be in everyone's medicine cabinet everyone should know how to use it everyone should there's no one who should i mean if you you know of any place that you would like me to do a talk or a training at your facility i'm happy to do that my number is two six three three zero five seven seven seven and i can come and do training your place and everyone should have and i can't stress that because enough because it's a difference between life and death and we're prescribing more and more opiates and we'll be ascribing more and more opiates in the future and we're designing stronger and stronger opiates in the future that's  to take a larger and larger amounts of nor to stop and every i think i've i mean i don't know the exact stat but he was said the majority of households in the state of washington have some or all expiring or active opiates in there whether it be a viking or oxy cotton and you have that on you in your cabinet you should have a thing that will save your life if you take too much so just five minutes left so since prescribe opiates are so common now how would you describe what an overdose looks like and i think everybody knows that well and over to simple thing an overdose is someone who is not moving and not breathing so you with opiates you get so relaxed your body forgets to breathe and then you kind of suffocate and then all everything else starts feeling quickly  center of your chest and you rub up and down hard it's going to annoy him enough to some of the say stop right and if they say stop they are still alive and they do not say stop and not have any responses it's because they are becoming incapacitated and so that's when you would star considering using the ox own also shaking them a little and letting you know yelling their names walsall help if they respond  you know then it's to the next step of start giving them the ox now would you recommend people if they're dealing with someone they believe has overdosed that they call nine one one will help arrive in time where they don't have to do this or is this something that they need to fully intervene with well if you call nine one one and you of him call and the emergency service is going to be so much farther away they will likely die before the emergency service gets there and that's not because we have bad mergence the service we in rural areas they just are they don't get there as fast because there's not a hospital next to you if i dropped dead from an overdose on forty fifty years the way the medical staff is going to be three to five minutes and i mean my life is going to be saved so i would encourage people to call now and inform them that your friend is not breathing because if you call the police if you tell me terrorism police will come we do have a good samaritan law that gives you some protection if you call for simple possession some immunity with that so i would definitely use no accent if you have no marks on that's the thing that's probably going to save your life and the empties that's what they're going to use anyway so there is some complicated and there could be some other issues see me want to call nine one but again in the rural areas there are unlikely to make it to you so that's why how important it is to use  win lots of t shirts and some prizes so you should totally come and that's august fourth sixty five time starts at seven and then the barbecue and celebration will start at noon in the alleyway well with that we are unfortunately out of time i want to thank you very much for coming to spend time with us this morning you're welcome thank you