Free Subscribers: If $5 a month is too much, then how about $10 a year?
If you value my work, then please help me to continue doing it
You are one of about 6,500 free subscribers on Substack, where I also have about 200 paying supporters. I appreciate that Substack’s minimum $5 a month fee—set by the system rather than by me—is too much for many people. But there is another option: to support me on Patreon for just $10 a year. I’m writing to ask you to do that.
I started Substack in May 2022 because my income from Patreon, which had peaked at $9,000 a month in 2021, had by then fallen steadily to $6500 a month. I was concerned that Substack’s $5 a month minimum would be too much for many people, but I had no other option, because of Patreon’s seemingly inexorable decline.
The revenue from paying supporters on Substack has softened the blow from Patreon, but it is now flatlining at $18,000 a year, and Patreon is still falling (see the plots at the end of this post). I’m therefore writing to you to ask you, if you value my work, to sign up to the lowest tier on Patreon of US$1 a month (there is a yearly discount as well that reduces that to just over US$10 a year).
I need your help, because the decline in my income has reached a point where it is interfering with my capacity to do the original work on economics that is my raison d'être.
If that work were either not necessary, or if other people could do it, then I would have retired like a normal person at 65 (six years ago), and perhaps become a “grey nomad”. Instead, that work is vitally necessary, and—false modesty aside—I am the only person who can do it.
That’s not to say that I’m the only person working on a new paradigm in economics, or criticising the Neoclassical mainstream. Stephanie Kelton is doing great things promoting Modern Monetary Theory; Louis-Phillippe Rochon is “grandfathering” the modern generation of Post-Keynesian economists; the Rethinking Economics movement in general is keeping up the critique of Neoclassical economics; etc.
But I have contributed on a far wider range of topics than any other living economist, and I’ve made contributions that no-one else was capable of making. Given humanity’s current ecological predicament, my two most vital contributions are:
Developing Minsky, the first and only program that enables dynamic models of money to be constructed.
Minsky, is vital, because the dominant economic analysis of money at present is akin to astronomy before Galileo. Just as pre-Galilean astronomers had a model of the universe that was structurally false, economists have a model of money that violates the “Fundamental Laws of Accounting”. Minsky is the first and currently the only program that can expose that, just as Galileo’s Telescope was the first astronomical instrument which could show that there were moons around Jupiter and craters on the moon—facts which contradicted the Ptolemaic belief that the Earth was the centre of the Universe, and that the “Heavenly Bodies” were perfect; and
Exposing the ludicrous assumptions about climate change that have led economists to mislead our policymakers, and the public in general, with delusional underestimates of what global warming will do to human civilisation.
I find it incredible that I am the first person to expose how stupid their assumptions are, in works like “The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change” and Loading the DICE against pension funds. But it is a fact: though other economists criticised them on other valid grounds, I am the first and still the only economist actively attacking their stupid assumptions about the physical and economic impacts that climate change will have on humanity.
The harm that these false beliefs by mainstream economists have done to humanity are incalculable.
Their monetary beliefs allow financial crises to develop, and lead governments to be obsessed about “balancing the books”, when they should be creating the fiat-backed money that a healthy capitalist economy needs. We will also need to fund action on global warming once it becomes apparent that the dangers are far greater, and far more immediate, than economists have claimed. Yet political leaders may initially be paralysed by the irrelevant question of “how do we pay for it?”, rather than focusing on the key issue of “what can we do to avert catastrophe?”.
Their environmental beliefs may well lead to the collapse of human civilisation, and potentially as soon as this decade. Their delusions must be brought to the attention of policymakers if we are to have any hope of avoiding an existential crisis during your own lifetime.
I want to be able to work on these topics, without my mind being disturbed by financial pressures. If I were a single man with no dependents, my situation would be bearable. But I have a wife who is past retirement age, and an extended family for whom I am building a house in Bangkok. The decline in my income has reached the point that the house may not be able to be built, and I might lose the money I have already put into it.
So, I am appealing to you: if you value my work, and if you can spare as little as $10 a year, then please sign up to Patreon at the $1/Month (or $10/Year) pledge.
Apart from the $10 per year cost, the only downside for you—if you remain a free subscriber on Substack as well—is that you will receive two very similar emails from me whenever I post something. You can always delete one, and read the other. And you can still read my posts on Substack. I have always made my posts open access (except where there were copyright issues for my publishers), and I will continue to do that.
Please also let your like-minded friends know that their support is needed, and ask them to sign up too. It is extremely galling to me that mainstream economists who are, unwittingly or not, contributing to the destruction of human civilisation, are being handsomely rewarded for it, while I have to struggle to survive as I fight to give humanity a semblance of a chance at avoiding ecological catastrophe. Please do your bit to tilt the scales ever so slightly in my favour.
Support me on Patreon for just $10 a year
Yours sincerely,
Prof Steve Keen