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Minsky: Stability is Destabilizing

The Kick­starter cam­paign to raise funds to fur­ther devel­op “Min­sky”, my dynam­ic mon­e­tary sim­u­la­tion pro­gram, has been launched. The imme­di­ate objec­tive is to raise $50,000, which will enable the cur­rent ver­sion of Min­sky to be com­plet­ed. The ulti­mate goal is to raise $1 mil­lion or more to ful­ly devel­op the con­cept.

Click here for the Kick­starter cam­paign. If you have appre­ci­at­ed my work over the last sev­en years to warn about the eco­nom­ic cri­sis, to devel­op an approach to macro­eco­nom­ics that can under­stand why it hap­pened, and to devel­op poli­cies that might help end it, the please show this by mak­ing a pledge.

Let your net­work know about it too. The more peo­ple who kick in, the bet­ter.

Some key facts about Kick­starter cam­paigns:

  • They run only for a set num­ber of days: this cam­paign will end on March 18. If you don’t give by then, you can’t give lat­er. So if you want to help, pledge now.
  • Pledg­ing ear­ly is a very good idea. The faster a project reach­es its tar­get, gen­er­al­ly the more it raises–there is a “band­wag­on” effect amongst Kick­starters. Also, a fast-ris­ing project tends to get select­ed by Kick­starter staff as a “Staff Pick”. That gives it more pub­lic­i­ty and rais­es yet more funds.
  • Pledg­ing is easy. You choose the amount you want to pledge and click. That takes you to an Ama­zon page where, if you’ve ever bought any­thing from them before­hand, you already have an account. Con­firm the pledge there, and that’s it. If the project gets its tar­get amount of mon­ey or more, then at the end of the cam­paign (some time around March 20) the amount you pledge will be trans­ferred to the Min­sky project by Ama­zon (minus about 10% rep­re­sent­ing Ama­zon and Kick­starter’s fees).

I have great hopes for this pro­gram. As a teach­ing tool, I hope it will excite young econ­o­mists and entice them away from the sta­t­ic, equi­lib­ri­um-fix­at­ed, barter mod­el they are cur­rent­ly taught in Uni­ver­si­ties around the world. As a research tool, I hope it will devel­op in the same way that Loren­z’s mod­el of flu­id dynam­ics did, from a “toy” mod­el to the basis of mod­ern weath­er fore­cast­ing. The eco­nom­ics could nev­er be fore­cast as the weath­er is, obvi­ous­ly. But explic­it­ly acknowl­edg­ing the com­plex, mon­e­tary, non-equi­lib­ri­um nature of the econ­o­my has to make for a bet­ter eco­nom­ics.

Help me real­ize those hopes by pro­vid­ing the fund­ing need­ed to take the pro­gram to its full poten­tial. Kick­start Min­sky Now!