Econintersect: Steve Keen’s Kickstarter crowdfunding effort closed several hours ago with a total of $78,025 raised from 620 contributors. The campaign finished with a flourish as more than 60 contributors and $14,000 was added over the two final days. There was strong grass 
roots support with 481 contributors pledging less than $125 each. At the other end of the scale “big money” supporters contributed $15,000, one each at $5,000 and $10,000. This will fund more than 600 hours of additional programming which is expected to finish the Minsky monetary economic modeling tool. Keen said that a preliminary release of a multi-commodity production model should also be started with this funding.
Keen will be presenting a paper at the INET (Institute for New Economic Thinking) conference in Hong Kong next month. The paper will present new results from the Minsky program.
The successful Kickstarter campaign will now have the following result, according to Keen:
Minsky will then [after $50,000 additiobnal investment] be a very effective teaching tool for monetary macroeconomics, which could also be used to build reasonable scalar models of an economy—similar in their level of detail that conventional economic models have today, though far more realistic since they would be inherently dynamic, monetary and non-equilibrium.
Ultimately, Keen seeks to gain grants totaling $1 million. He says:
That will enable us to take Minsky all the way to stage 3—where it can model multiple countries, multiple banks, and financial and physical flows for multiple commodities, and where it can perform nonlinear parameter optimization to fit models to data.
Sources:
- MINSKY: Reforming economics with visual monetary modeling (Steve Keen, Kickstarter, as of 18 March 2013)
- Why I’m Supporting Steve Keen (John Lounsbury, GEI Opinion, 08 March 2013)
