What is needed is something to supplement the required textbook. Many of the suggestions here are worth checking out, so why not just point him to this blog and let him decide what would be most useful to him?

Recently I had occasion to reread Keynes’s “Essays in Persuasion.” At the time (i.e. before I read this blog) it occurred to me that Part 2 of that book would be an ideal introduction to macroeconomics. It presents the basic ideas of the General Theory in a nontechnical way.

Students should be told the basic fact that how one organizes an economy makes a difference in the quality of life of the citizens. Even in my generation (I’m 60) many people were not fully aware of the differences between the Soviet Union and the U.S., or East Germany and West Germany. Today’s students probably have no clue at all about this, since Communism disintegrated when they were toddlers. Unfortunately I don’t have a specific reference at hand – I am just making a general suggestion to start with the facts of economic history before getting into economic theory.

You may disagree with him, but comparing him, not just to an IDer but to a creationist would seem to be going just a little far.

It is well known that only under certain conditions the market demand will possess the properties of individual demand. The main condition is that the utility functions have Gorman form, which author correctly identifies4.

4 This turns out to be the key condition only if we limit ourselves to the consideration of aggregate demand as a function of the mean level of wealth. Weaker conditions can be imposed if aggregate demand is allowed to depend on some other aggregates. None of these issues are mentioned by the author. See MWG, Proposition 4.B.1 and the discussion that follows it. Incidentally, the author mislabels the aggregation conditions as Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu conditions. This is rather curious, given that the author provides Shafer and Sonnenschein (1982) as a reference. For a discussion of Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, see MWG,
Sec. 17.E.

This is IMO a svery trong indication of Keen writing about something without understanding it. You simply don´t get Gormans stuff from reading a paper on excess demand functions (the paper in question is the entry on excess demand functions in the Handbook of Mathematical Economics).

John Emerson:

I agree that using the more sophisticated models, not every economic theory can be replicated. But I don´t think one should look for a economic “theory of everything”. What one should hope for is illumination of some problems. And I definitely think economics can help clarify many issues.

I don’‘t think that you have to give a viable alternative to bad theories. This seems to be the fall-back position in defense of economics. I rally have no alternative solution to the problems raised by alchemy or astrology, for example.

My entire interest in economics is in the way economics relates to what else we know about things from other points of view, and in the effects that economics as a profession has on the world. I’m not a competing economist, but an outside observer of economics.

I’ve spent some time recently looking at what economists say about rationality. Roughly speaking, Sen and Gintis seem to come up with definitions of rationality which are not totally ridiculous and unreal, but I wonder whether they could ever function the way the simpler definitions do for economists trying to describe the economy systematically. They, especially Sen’s version, seem too messy to plug into a system. So the gain in realism and in ethical plausibility comes at the cost of depriving systematic economists of a neat little tool.

john emerson. What is a median economist? Median with respect to what variable?

As Steve Keen observes, this is far from the first book to attack the validity of economics, and it is unlikely to be the last. Similarly, this is not the first review of such a book, and surely not the last. Some points are more or less inevitable in such a review, so I will make them as briefly as possible before moving on. First, critiques are, by nature, stronger in attacking existing orthodoxy than in presenting alternatives. Secondly, most criticisms are not entirely new, and the proponents of orthodoxy usually have some sort of response. Third, the version of orthodoxy presented in a critique will almost always be a little out-of-date and something of a caricature. Keen’s book will no doubt generate all of these responses, but it is, nonetheless, well worth reading.

I’m curious as to whether “dynamic equilibrium” isn’t a kind of fudge of indeterminacy, chaos, and the like. As far as I know, physical and historical reality is never close to equilibrium and doesn’t even necessarily tend to converge to equilibrium.