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I'm so pleased to have back with us, my old friend, Professor Steve Keane, the economist, the author of several books, including taking the con out of economics,

and his new book, The New Economics, a manifesto, find his website at Prof. Steve Keane, Keane Keane, and his Twitter handle is Prof. PR-OF, Prof. Steve Keane.

Steve, it's been a long time since we've talked, and I'm so glad to have you back with us.

And thank you so much for getting up, you know, insanely early in the morning there in Australia to spend an hour with us and do a deep dive in the economics.

Much appreciated.

Thank you. It's actually much better than other sites in Thailand, we're working two o'clock in the morning, so it actually worked out a lot of well.

Good, good. Okay, let's start at the beginning. In your book, you talk about how our understanding of economics, our modern understanding of economics,

the started in the 1770s with Adam Smith publishing, Wealth of Nations, and in the early 1800s with on labor.

Yeah, David Ricardo, that these guys missed a fundamental piece of economics. They completely basically overlooked in their notion about wealth being derived primarily from the production of labor and capital, that they missed a third variable that as in some ways arguably led to the ongoing destruction of our planet. Tell me about that.

Tom, it's a compliment to you, trust you, is what the most important point in the book and the lead with it. It's leading now the role of the energy.

And the ironic thing is that it was actually part of economics theory before Adam Smith turned up, as you know, from reading the book.

Even though the word energy wasn't actually invented until 1809 by an English polymath, and the reason it was in theory was the rival school of economics, which predates the classical school of Smith and Ricardo.

Called the Physiocrats in France, fundamentally had a theory that said all wealth comes from the sun.

It basically said that there is a free gift of nature. That's literally if you read it a lot earlier, you'll find that phrase.

We exist because of the free gift of nature, and that free gift was obvious to the French because it was stored very by far more in agricultural society than the UK was, even at that time.

And of course, if you plant one seed, then you get a plant with a thousand seeds on it, and that was seen as a free gift.

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