Minsky (economic simulator)

For other uses, see Minsky (disambiguation).
Minsky (economic simulator)
Stable release 1.0 / 28 July 2013 (2013-07-28)
Written in C++, Tcl
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac
Type Simulator
License GPL3
Website sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/

Minsky is an open source visual computer program for dynamic simulation of economic models. Its name is a tribute to the unorthodox American economist Hyman Minsky (1919 – 1996) who pioneered the underlying approach. The originator of the Minsky simulator project is, Dr. Steve Keen, one of the few academic economists to anticipate the Financial crisis of 2007–08, using an earlier dynamic monetary model of a possible financial crisis that he had developed.

Description

Mainstream economic theory ignores banks, debt and money completely, and imagines that the dynamic, innovative and crisis-prone social system we call capitalism can be modeled as if it is almost always in equilibrium. Minsky was designed to make a different approach to economic modeling possible: one in which banks, debt and money are indispensable, and in which the economy is always changing.[1] With Minsky, models are built using flowcharts and a double entry bookkeeping system known as a Godley table.[1]

Minsky can be used for any dynamical systems modelling not just economics. It has applications in chaos theory and biological modelling. It has been used to implement classic chaotic models like the Lorenz attractor and Duffing Chaos

Development

Minsky has been developed for the Australian economist Steve Keen by lead programmer Russell K. Standish and programmers Nathan Moses & Kevin Pereira.[1]

The development of Minsky was funded first by an academic research grant of $128,000 from INET the Institute for New Economic Thinking. 1000 hours of programming work went into it.[2] Then, in February 2013, Keen launched a crowdfunding project for further development of the program. The Kickstarter campaign started on Feb 9, 2013 and ended on Mar 17, 2013. The campaign exceeded its goal of $50,000 and, at the end, $78,025 were contributed for the project.

The objective of the project is to develop a standalone dynamic monetary macroeconomic modelling tool that would be more suited to financial flows than existing systems dynamics programs such as Simulink , Vensim , Vissim and Stella . Keen envisages Minsky being used for educational and research purposes. Keen himself uses Minsky for his own work based on the Financial Instability Hypothesis of Hyman Minsky.

Minsky is released in open source and was SourceForge's open source project of the month in January 2014.[1]

Sources

Links

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 SourceForge Minsky - Project of the month January 2014. Interview with Minsky development team. Accessed January 2014
  2. ↑ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2123355930/minsky-reforming-economics-with-visual-monetary-mo


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, February 13, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.