Conclusion

I hope that the preceding chapters give you a reasonable introduction to modelling in Minsky , as well as an explanation of why continuous time system dynamics modelling is an excellent foundation for a monetary, far-from-equilibrium, biophysical approach to modelling capitalism.

There are some features of Minsky that I haven’t discussed, mainly because their implementation at present is incomplete. One obvious such feature is grouping: as noted on section 6.2 on page 69, grouping still has significant bugs which make it advisable not to use this feature at present. We have also enabled unit analysis in Minsky , which is a powerful means of checking the logic of a model, but the implementation doesn’t as yet work smoothly enough to recommend its use. I’ve probably spent too much time in theoretical digressions rather than simply explaining how to build a model as well. I’ll try to return to this manual/book and improve those aspects of it as time permits.

For now, I would be delighted if you started using Minsky to build Post Keynesian oriented dynamic models of capitalism, and biophysical models of the dependence of the economy on the biosphere. One positive-negative of the current state of development of Post Keynesian economics is that, since most Post Keynesian models use “time periods”, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in reimplementing these models in continuous time. A second positive-negative is that the field of dynamic integrated biophysical monetary modelling is virtually pristine: there is so much to be done. If you do embark upon modelling with Minsky , you won’t run out of research projects any time soon—and the existence of relatively easily solved “puzzles”, Kuhn notes, is an important part of the development of a “Normal Science” after a period of revolutionary upheaval:

The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skilful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort. (Kuhn 1970)

As I argued in Manifesto, economics has been locked in a pre-scientific state ever since Walras, Jevons and Menger in the 1870s, and arguably, ever since Smith distorted the empirically sound foundations of the Physiocrats with the argument that the division of labour—and not the “free gift of nature”—was the basis on which the economy and economic growth were built. Even progressive rival schools of thought like Post Keynesian economics and MMT have remained either based on Neoclassical modelling foundations that they should have abandoned—primarily, equilibriumoriented modelling and the use of “time periods” rather than continuous time—or they have not developed a widespread practice of dynamic modelling because the technology to do it properly was accessible only to a tiny cohort of suitably trained non-mainstream economists.

Minsky is far from perfect, and far from finished, but I believe it is sufficiently well designed and sufficiently complete to enable a community of modelers to grow around it, to share models, and to illustrate how much more fruitful and realistic a dynamic, non-equilibrium, monetary, energy-aware approach to economics is when compared to the stale, equilibrium-fixated, barter-based, energyignorant work of Neoclassicals.

Please help turn this belief into reality.