Should Government Run Surpluses

Prof.Steve Keen writes & talks:

At a talk entitled “The Age of Entitlement is Over?” at the [Sydney] Northside Forum, after recommending George Monbiot’s excellent article on grouse I used the Open Source program Minsky to model what can happen when a government runs a permanent surplus. The result is not what advocates of government surpluses expect. (you can download the model Prof.Keen used in Minsky).

In a nutshell, country economics don’t work on exactly the same basis as companies or households. Pretending that they are all the same is a really bad idea.