Debunking Economics - the podcast

This week Phil and Steve confront the mathematical and environmental reality of a "zero growth" future, sparked by a debate over the deflationary traps of finite currency systems like Bitcoin. Steve thoroughly dismantles standard neoclassical theories of "decoupling"—the fantasy that global economies can indefinitely expand their wealth while reducing energy consumption—exposing how mainstream economic models trivialise energy as a minor production input. By presenting real-world data showing a linear, lockstep relationship between global energy use and gross world product over the last 50 years, the hosts argue that modern capital is merely a conduit for turning energy into useful work. Ultimately, they outline the profound structural challenges of transitioning to a deliberate zero-growth framework, explaining why managing a massive, debt-leveraged economic downshift is a biophysical necessity for the planet, yet an absolute impossibility under our current credit-driven capitalist architecture. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How much longer can the United States rely on the US dollar to dominate the global financial system, and what happens when the cracks finally start to show? In this week's Debunking Economics podcast, Phil Dobbie and Professor Steve Keen travel back to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference to revisit John Maynard Keynes's ultimate lost argument. Steve details how Keynes's visionary proposal for a global clearing union and an international currency—the Bancor—was explicitly designed to penalise both hoarding surplus nations and debt-ridden deficit nations, spreading wealth to developing countries and preventing destructive "beggar-thy-neighbour" tariff wars. By rejecting Keynes's framework in favour of institutionalised US dollar hegemony, the modern global economy has instead trapped itself in a cycle of systemic trade imbalances and ballooning private debt. Tune in to explore why today's aggressive tariff landscapes are exposing the structural fragility of the greenback, whether Alternative Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) baseline assumptions are entirely wrong about trade, and what a chaotic shift away from the world's primary reserve currency means for global stability. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Phil and Steve confront the global surge in anti-immigration rhetoric and right-wing political momentum, tracing its roots to the structural failures of neoliberalism rather than the actions of migrants themselves. Steve dissects how decades of fiscal paranoia, deregulation, and slashed public spending on health, welfare, and education systematically eroded working-class security, turning migrants into easy scapegoats for falling real wages and housing shortages. They evaluate how corporate-led migration has been historically weaponized by business elites to depress labour costs at the expense of local training, while contrasting the economic benefits of "capital deepening" through technology against raw "capital broadening" through rapid population expansion. Ultimately, it paves the way for Pauline Hanson and Nigel Farage tocapitalise on very real working-class anxieties, but their adherence to the exact same deficit-obsessed economic playbooks will only invite further structural chaos. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Steve and Phil critique our systemic over-reliance on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the definitive baseline for comparing global economies and measuring societal well-being. The discussion underscores a fundamental flaw in neoclassical modeling: while GDP measures raw industrial output, it completely fails to reflect actual public welfare due to stark differences in income distribution, unpriced volunteer and domestic labour, and varying national structures of public service delivery. For instance, a per-capita GDP comparison artificially flatters the United States over Europe or China simply because American citizens are forced to spend massive out-of-pocket sums on privatised health care, transport, and education—essential services that are heavily subsidised or provided entirely free by the state elsewhere. Would it be more worthwhile to measure something fundamental, like the relative happiness of a nation. Steve argues that GDP still has a place, but it should never be used on its own. That’s just lazy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Phil and Steve dig into the storm of controversy over Australia's new budget rules targeting property speculators. The Labor government has scaled back negative gearing and abolished the 50% capital gains tax discount for established dwellings—major tax shelters that have historically rewarded people for gambling on rising asset prices rather than working productive jobs. Steve demonstrates that the country's absurd house-price-to-income ratio is driven entirely by the acceleration of private mortgage debt, heavily fueled by decades of destructive government policies designed to protect the wealth of baby boomers. Phil notes that while these changes may discourage real estate hoarding, Australia's massive, housing-reliant pool of intergenerational wealth still avoids inheritance taxes. So, is this a smart move by the Australian government, and could curbing the rentier class finally force the financial system to back local innovation instead of property speculation? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.