083: Stephen Kinsella on Stock Flow Models, Rent Controls and Being the Green Lantern of Economics

Stephen Kinsella is a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Kemmy Business School, the University of Limerick in Ireland and a Research Fellow at the Geary Institute at University College Dublin. He is currently visiting Professor of Economics at Université Paris.

Stephen has two PhD’s, is well published in many Economics Journals and has won several grants worth around 1.5 million Euro.

Stephen’s area of expertise is in the study of the Irish and European economies.

He has written 4 books:

• Ireland in 2050: How we will be Living
• Understanding Ireland’s Economic Crisis: Prospects for Recovery
• QuickWin Economics and
• Computable Economics.

Stephen is a weekly columnist for the Sunday Business Post newspaper and he also has his own website stephenkinsella.net which is amazingly rich in content, covering issues on the Irish and European economy as well as material he covers in his lectures.

Economics:

In this episode, Stephen mentions: stock flow consistent models, rent controls, GDP, wealth, consumption, government expenditure, investment, net exports, debt-to-GDP, stock of unemployed-to-flow of the labor force, taxes, austerity, QE, pro-cyclical policy, unemployment, automatic stabilizers, Brexit, foreign direct investment, hyperinflation, purchasing power of money, housing, pricing mechanism and money supply.

Economists:

In this episode, Stephen mentions: Wynne Godley, Lance Taylor, Marc Lavoie, Kevin O’Rourke, Philip Lane, Dermot McAleese, Edward Nell, Carmen M. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff and Joseph Stiglitz.

In this episode you will learn:

• how and why Stephen completed two PhD’s and how he completed his first within 12 months.
• about stock flow consistent models.
• about the features of a stock flow model.
• why the Irish government bailed out the banks.
• how Ireland received ‘help’ from international economies, particularly the US and the UK, to quickly move out of a recession since the Great Financial Crisis.
• whether Ireland will suffer if the UK left the EU in the so-called Brexit.
• how rent controls lead to an inefficient market outcome.

Links:

• Institute of New Economic Thinking

Papers:

• Stephen Kinsella (2001). Hedgehog Logic – the Problems of Econometrics Today. Student Economic Review.
• Stephen Kinsella (2007). Logarithms: A Tutorial.

Books: 

• QuickWin Economics-Answers to Your Top 100 Economics Questions by Stephen Kinsella
• Ireland in 2050: How we will be Living by Stephen Kinsella
• Understanding Ireland’s Economic Crisis: Prospects for Recovery by Stephen Kinsella
• Monetary Economics An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth by Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie
• Swimming with Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk
• This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James Scott

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