Steve Keen and the price of fame

After becoming a celebrity economist down under as a result of being one of the few dismal scientists to see the global financial market meltdown coming a few years back, Steve Keen has learned to take the good with the bad, that is, unless it crosses some sort of line, which, according to this entry at his blog, Jessica Irvine at the Sydney Morning Herald just did.

I normally don’t comment on articles about me, since I am aware that now that my views are part of the public debate, I have to take the good with the bad in coverage. I wouldn’t have written this either, were it not for the line “If only his predictions were so reliable” in Jessica Irvine’s piece in today’s SMH “Walking on a wire stretched between stimulus and debt“.

In a newspaper that sees itself as a paper of record, I would have expected a bit of context here–some acknowledgment of the fact that I was calling a serious financial crisis from December 2005, whereas conventional economic forecasters were predicting falling unemployment and rising inflation–rather than a throwaway line like that.

Here's the offending piece from today's paper:

You've got to hand it to Steve Keen, the mild-mannered house price Cassandra of Sydney's western suburbs: he knows how to get a headline and he sticks to his guns. If only his predictions were so reliable.

The 57-year-old academic will embark on a 224-kilometre hike from Canberra to the top of Mount Kosciuszko in April, wearing a T-shirt reading ''I was hopelessly wrong on house prices. Ask me how!'' He lost a bet against a Macquarie Bank economist, Rory Robertson, that house prices would fall.

In fairness to Keen (and while acknowledging that I'm far from an expert on the local economy), conditions in Australia would undoubtedly be much different if not for the fact that they are a natural resource rich country located close to China where stockpiling commodities financed through one of the most rapid expansions of bank credit in history appears to be a national obsession.