I refer to Associate Professor Steve Keen’s comment in yesterday’s Crikey (Crikey, Tuesday, item 4, “Steve Keen: An invitation to Gerard Henderson“). He also wrote to me direct.
Initially, I should state that I share Dr Keen’s pain that he has made five unsuccessful applications for ARC funding over recent years. Life can be tough in the taxpayer funded academy. To help relieve Dr Keen’s personal burden, I have offered to purchase his Surry Hills apartment for 40 per cent below what he has told me is his reserve price. In view of Dr Keen’s prediction that property values will decline by 40 per cent over the next few years, this is a reasonable offer. I look forward to a prompt exchange of contracts.
I have not been so impolite as to ask the learned professor why he has a reserve price – in view of his educated opinion that property values will fall dramatically and remain low for around a decade. I can only trust that he is not publicly preaching a property-values-will-fall mantra while privately assuming that his own property can remain at its current market value.
Steve Keen commenced his email to me yesterday with the following comment: “I’m pleased that you have read some of my work and of course what I’ve written doesn’t prove that a Great Depression is inevitable”.
It is a pity that, in public, he makes no such concessions. On 19 September 2008, Dr Keen was asked by the Daily Telegraph: “When will Armageddon hit”. He replied: “Any time in the next couple of years”. On 60 Minutes last Sunday, the following exchange took place – Liz Hayes: “Recession or depression, which are we heading for?” Steve Keen: “Unfortunately a depression”.
The fact is that Professor Keen cannot actually predict the future. It is not (in his terminology) playing the man rather than the ball to point this out. If someone makes an irresponsible prophecy in the public debate, he or she should expect some responses. It seems that Professor Keen is somewhat sensitive to criticism.
Here’s hoping that your man gets an ARC grant and that he attains appropriate rental accommodation to write up his findings.
Steve Keen believes property prices will drop 40% in the next few years. Steve Keen is selling a property. That sounds logical. Why wait for the 40% drop in prices?
Gerard Henderson thinks Steve should immediately accept his offer of 40% below the asking price to prove “he is not publicly preaching a property-values-will-fall mantra while privately assuming that his own property can remain at its current market value”. There is no logic to that.
Typical Henderson. Keen’s put an argument out there, which may or may not be correct. But Henderson in his typical deeply unpleasant manner not only attacks the man, but sniffs around some pgoto of his partner too. The response above is snide without humour or wit. The man is chafed thighs. He’s broken chalk on a blackboard. A wet fart in terry-towelling. The smell of a bar fridge that hasn’t been opened for a couple of years in a rumpus room you’re cleaning out during an attack of the flu. Add your own.
Does Henderson actually have an argument about why Keen might be wrong? Or is he just bitter about someone else’s fame? Or desperate to serve capital by talking it up? He began by arguing that the whole financial crisis had been caused by Jimmy Carter’s 1977 Community Reinvestment Act – the approved right wing response, which was so arsefuck dumb that they soon abandoned it. Now they just attack anyone with a negative prognosis as ‘wanting it to fail’. It’s worth asking whose flute Henderson is tootling. After all the Sydney Institute was funded by the crook Rodney Adler for quite a while, and ripped off money undoubtably paid for a few canapes. Who’s footing the bill these days?
WTF? This was a lame response even by Henderson’s lame standards. The poor guy wants out of the housing market BEFORE it drops 40 percent, dimwit.
God Gerard you are a bore! Why dont you give us all a rest?
Gerard – if you are suggesting they pay you too much and Professor Keen too little (such that he needs an ARC grant to find rental accommodation) you are absolutely right – but who is it that really pays you and tells you what to chant and where is your research? If you lose your job as a second rate newspaper hack columnist because people get bored with the same old same old, there is always being a shoeshine boy. Bush is looking for another one since John Howard got turfed out.