Professor Steve Keen is best known to US neoclassical economists as that deviant who resisted the charm of Paul Krugman, and to Australian neoclassical economists as that bloke who lost a bet. To some punters, he’s a better bet than most. Keen, whose economics school at the University of Western Sydney closed its doors when glossier universities opened theirs, relies on the panic of strangers. The economic meltdown of 2007-2008 — predicted by Keen, Ann Pettifor and a handful of heterodox others — moved some to doubt the dominant economic wisdom and trust this 60-something brat with their money.

Keen still works part time at a Kingston University London, but his research is largely funded by the crowd.

Don’t ask me to describe the maths of Hyman Minsky, which provide something of a foundation for Keen’s. I have now enjoyed (most of) several Skype chats with Keen, and I’m at least one postdoctoral thesis away from grasping his several explanations.

There’s a few Keen exhortations we can all understand together. First, capitalism has a crisis tendency. Second, writing for Russia Today (RT) is great fun, because, “Ha ha. This anti-Russian hysteria is like a boring version of Dr Strangelove and I do enjoy being Putin’s useful idiot.”

Third, the finance sector does not behave in the way neoclassical moralisers says that it can. Banks produce money from money. Persons are enslaved to debt. And “well, [deft sequence of expletives] how can you believe a bank collects reserves — deposits, you with me, Helen? — and allows this to control its lending? So, when there’s a rush on and the ATMs are low on cash, the bank issues no more loans?! Ha. This is abject denial.”

Denial does appear to inform our policymakers. This is most evident when, say, the Prime Minister describes an empirical account by an economics correspondent as something other than an empirical account. This is less evident in the failure to recognise that a finance sector-led crash was finance-sector led.

“Capitalism is a meritocracy! For fuck’s sake. And we will all be rewarded if we believe that money plays no role, is the result of a job well done. This productivity mania. This belief that if we put out more calories than Cicero did, there will be only gain for all.” Keen’s impatience with orthodox thought is easily stirred — actually, his impatience with my Marxist thought is easily stirred, and should you ever chat with the man, do not ask him about the tendency of rate of profit to fall and expect to eat dinner at a civilised hour. Do value the economist with a righteous temper, though. Not enough of it about.

In 1929, capitalism cracked and argument raged about its best form of repair. To cut a long crisis short, private markets were now subject to state regulation and private poor citizens a little less so. We can call it it Keynesianism, although Franklin D Roosevelt wouldn’t. In the 1970s, capitalism cracked again, and this time, the solution was to formalise the laissez-faire policies that preceded the Great Depression (which were never, from the get-go, laissez-faire) and regulate an unregulated market.

Neoliberalism would produce its own crisis, as Keynesianism had. But by 2007-08, angry economists who scorn the idea of perfect capitalist equilibrium — a balance that has never existed and could not, were it even attainable, survive the dynamic, mutating nature of the system — were in very short supply. And so, we should be glad for Keen’s long, often loud opposition.

I ask him if he’d ever been one to acquiesce, or the type to join a club. “Oh, fuck, no. I refused to join the cadets back at Catholic school in Kogarah.” He did, however, join the debating club at Marist Brothers, formed libertarian conservative views and, I’d wager, expressed these freely. He held them confidently until his first days at Sydney University in the early 1970s. He swaggered into an O-week debate, met his first real-life feminist and was, “absolutely slaughtered. My friends said, ‘she killed you’, and their assessment was correct”. A feminist anarchist, he says, exposed him to “true, significant debate”, and to anarchism. He’s yet to shed his partiality to either.

Frank Stilwell, now emeritus professor at Sydney’s Department of Political Economy exposed Keen to the fiction of perfectly intersecting curves, and the ALP — whose Hurstville branch he did fleetingly join — exposed him to disappointment. Handing out how-to-vote cards, restating vapid belief wasn’t for him. “Just cannon fodder for the Sussex Street mob.”

Keen now prefers to explode autonomously. And so, he avoids appearing on the BBC where he finds questions to be of a quality “so shithouse, like most mainstream media, it’s responsible for the success of RT”.

“And, by the way, if you despise a dictator supported by oligarchs who exploit the people mercilessly, don’t worry the fuck about Russia.”

We cackle. He tells me a dozen other stories in which he figures as the leading arsehole, and by the time we’ve arrived, again, at the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, I’m almost match fit to defend it.

Angry, heterodox economists are not dangerous, but useful. Useless denial of economic crisis is a danger.