Malcolm Sawyer is responding to the following questions:

What was your motivation to become an economist, how did you get in contact with heterodox economics and what were the major steps in your career as a professional economist?

Retrospectively, would you do anything different in your career or would you follow the same path?

What would be your career advice for young heterodox economists?

What role does Michel Kalecki's economics play in your conception of economics, and how important have his ideas been in shaping your own thinking?

If you think about the development of post-Keynesian economics, especially over the past thirty years or so, do you think there has been progress, and what do you think are the main open questions that have not been successfully solved? Also, and connected to that, what are the main reasons why post-Keynesianism did not succeed in convincing the majority of economists? There was a time when post-Keynesian economics could maybe have become the mainstream, but that was not the case, do you have any ideas as to why?

What are the main justified criticisms to be faced by post-Keynesians today? Do you think there are some structural reasons why post- Keynesianism did not become the mainstream?

Could you briefly characterise the main pillars of your macroeconomic approach, what is most important within that? You could perhaps mention the basic assumptions or the economic policy implications.

Do you think that the ongoing financial crisis, that is the financial crisis since 2007, will have a lasting impact on mainstream economics? Do you think there is a chance that post-Keynesian ideas will become stronger? Will there be a lasting impact of the crisis?

You already mentioned the austerity programmes all over the world, what would be your expectations? Will they work or what will be the effects of these programmes, particularly in the British case?

Does the functional finance approach not include a problem of public debt, or why does it not in your view?

In your view what can or should be done to change the way of economic thinking or the way of economic policy? Do you think that it is necessary for heterodox economists to actively promote their ideas? It occurred to us that you are a member of the Euromemo group, and so there seems to be quite some political impetus that you have. Do you think that is something good for economists, or is something that should be done by economists?