The Friede-Gard-Preis 2022 was awarded to Prof. Steve Keen PhD. The prize awarding ceremony was held at Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld on October 13th, 2022. A workshop by Professor Keen was held on the two following days.
Steve Keen ..-> CV & Publications
Professor Keen received the prize for his outstanding contributions to a ‚New Economics‘, acknowledging the dynamics and nonlinearity of the economic reality and free from deficits of the neoclassical foundations, especially for
- translating Minsky’s ‚Financial Instability Hypothesis‘ into an insightful mathematical model,
better understanding money and private debt,
- building mathematical models for economics including energy and matter,
helping to better recognize the scope of the ecological crisis,
- creating MINSKY, a powerful system dynamics software tool,
designed for building dynamic economical models, by its unique Godley-tables.
The awarding ceremony was introduced by the president of the University of Applied Sciences Trier, prof. Dr. Dorit Schumann, the Dean of the Faculty for Environmenatl Economics & Law, Prof. Dr. Klaus Helling, and the founder of the Friede-Gard-Stiftung, Gerd Schuster.
In his introduction (in English), Gerd Schuster directed the attention to a little known curve by Martin Weitzman, a neoclassical economist, showing the warming probabilities in case of a CO2-concentration of 700 ppm (as is likely by 2100 when proceeding in the business-as-usual way). This gives a most likely value of +2.7° (by chance, this is the optimal value from the DICE-model of William Nordhaus). Unfortunately the chances for a much higher warming are very high, which would result in a large or even terrifying large area of the earth becoming non-inhabitable.
..-> Text Intro Intro slides Intro slides
The laudation (in English) was held by Professor Michael Roos. He paid tribute to Steve Keen’s decades-long struggle against the basic faults in the predominant neoclassical thinking. He also demonstrated the failure of neoclassical climate economics.
..-> Laudation(slides) Laudation slides
In his price acceptance speech (in English) Steve Keen gave a vivid overview on his development and scientific work. He gave appropriate attention as well to his critique of the neoclassical mainstream, as well as to his alternative modeling of economics (with money, energy, and resources), including MINSKY, the modeling software developed largely by him.
..-> Acceptance Speech (slides) Acceptance speech Keen
A concluding presentation (in English) by Gerd Schuster showed how a up-to-date economics could look like.
..-> Slides System.Dynamics.Economics
The workshop (in English) on the two following days presented lectures with his critique of essential concepts of neoclassical thinking (fully debunking it so that the microeconomic foundation that is claimed by neoclassicals is a fake):
- rising marginal costs – empirically falsified,
- the Cobb-Douglas production function – merely a tautology,
- the form of indifference curves – empirically falsified,
- aggregation of individual consumption functions to a macroeconomic consumption function – only under unrealistic assumptions leading to the claimed form (Sonnenschein-mantel-Debreu theorem),
- the ‘veil of money’ – only valid for a barter economy, not for our credit-based economy;
and modeling exercises (money creation, Goodwin-model of business cycle, Keen-Minsky-model of the FIH Financial Instability Hypothesis of Hyman Minsky.
The recording of the prize awarding ceremony and the workshop are available on the YouTube-channel of the Friede-Gard-Foundation ( https://www.youtube.com/@Friede-Gard-Stiftung ) resp. that of Steve Keen.
The MINSKY software and a tutorial by Steve Keen are available for free on the internet.