QED

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QED stand for “Ques­nay Eco­nom­ic Dynam­ics”. It is a new soft­ware pro­gram that imple­ments my tab­u­lar method of devel­op­ing dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions.

I am cur­rent­ly work­ing on a sec­ond edi­tion of Debunk­ing Eco­nom­ics, and an entry on QED will form part of that book. When I have writ­ten that chap­ter, I will add the infor­ma­tion from it to this page, with doc­u­men­ta­tion, exam­ple files, and the like. For the mean­time, if you’d like to try QED out then click on the image below to down­load the ZIP file con­tain­ing the pro­gram.

Note: the zip file does­n’t down­load prop­er­ly in Inter­net Explor­er. It down­loads fine how­ev­er in Google Chrome. I expect it will also down­load well in oth­er browsers like Fire­fox. So if you only have IE on your com­put­er, try to down­load but if it gives you an invalid archive mes­sage, please install anoth­er brows­er instead and then down­load from with­in it.

Ques­nay Eco­nom­ic Dynam­ics

To run it, extract the file to a sub­di­rec­to­ry and then dou­ble click on the file QED.EXE. This loads the basic inter­face:

To test run the pro­gram, choose File/Open and select the mod­el “FreeBankingModel.sgr”. This is the first mod­el devel­oped in this paper. To see the mod­el itself, click on the “Actions” menu item and select “Ques­nay Table”. This table will then appear:

To run the mod­el, click on the “Phillips Dia­gram” menu item on the main QED pro­gram win­dow, which will show the fol­low­ing dynam­ic flow­chart that was gen­er­at­ed by this table:

Now click on the “Show Play­er” check­box at the top of the win­dow, and a play­er will appear down the bot­tom. Click on “Play” and the amounts in the reser­voirs (bank accounts) and flow valves (labelled A to I and with the same descrip­tors as in the left hand col­umn of the Ques­nay Table) will change. If you run it for five years (watch the “MODELTIME” counter in the top right hand side of the dia­gram and click on Stop), you should see the fol­low­ing:

The equa­tions in the mod­el are stored in two oth­er tables acces­si­ble from the “Actions” menu item on the main win­dow:  “Var/Equations” and “C.O.D. Equa­tions” respec­tive­ly. The for­mer gives val­ues to para­me­ters and the like; the lat­ter gives the equa­tions for the flows between the accounts:

There’s a lot more to the pro­gram, but that will have to do for now. To my knowl­edge it’s the only pro­gram around that uses a tab­u­lar inter­face to devel­op dynam­ic mod­els, and also pro­vides seam­less each-way devel­op­ment of a sys­tems engi­neer­ing dia­gram (the “For­rester Dia­gram” menu item that I haven’t men­tioned yet) from a table of equa­tions. It is ide­al­ly suit­ed to mod­el­ling finan­cial flows, and it’s my and my col­lab­o­ra­tor’s con­tri­bu­tion to help­ing the world under­stand how mon­ey works–which is the first step in under­stand­ing why our finan­cial sys­tem has per­formed so bad­ly and giv­en us the GFC.