In late 2007, the world walked blindfolded
into the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Economists, who should have warned about it, were in general useless.
The vast majority expected economic tranquility ahead; only a handful
warned of the crisis— and Steve Keen was one of that handful. The
key reason why most economists were unable to see the crisis coming is
that they have convinced themselves that banks are irrelevant to how the
economy operates, and too hard to model anyway. Keen has worked out
an easy way to model them in his program Minsky. "Minsky" is a dynamic, visual, monetary alternative to the static, clumsy "intersecting lines" models of conventional economics. Keen hopes that it will help reform economics by making it possible for young economists to do what old economists have for so long believed was impossible: to model the economy in time, out of equilibrium, and with money.
In a nutshell, Minsky is a visual way of modeling the economy as a dynamic system. It's a new addition to the family of system dynamics programs that enable complex systems to be designed using the metaphor of a flowchart—programs like Simulink and Vissim that engineers use, and Vensim, Stella and the like that are popular in management.
Kickstarter:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2123355930/minsky-reforming-economics-with-visual-monetary-mo/posts/403233
Ten videos on using Minsky
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2013/02/09/ten-videos-on-using-minsky/
