Mun iteration of Minsky now available

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The “Mun” iter­a­tion of Min­sky, the Open Source sys­tem dynam­ics pro­gram with spe­cial fea­tures to han­dle mon­e­tary mod­el­ing, is now avail­able at Source­Forge:

The Min­sky Home Page at Source­Forge

The pro­gram now sup­ports the basic fea­tures need­ed for sys­tem dynam­ics in gen­er­al, and has the added capa­bil­i­ty of mod­el­ing finan­cial flows using “God­ley Tables”, which are based on the dou­ble-entry book­keep­ing stan­dards of accoun­tants and make it easy to gen­er­ate dynam­ic (ordi­nary dif­fer­en­tial) equa­tions of finan­cial flows.

Thanks are due to the Insti­tute for New Eco­nom­ic Think­ing (INET) which pro­vid­ed the ini­tial fund­ing that enabled the project to start, and to the donors via Kick­starter who pro­vid­ed addi­tion­al funds that enabled this rather more pol­ished ver­sion to be devel­oped.

Incom­plete but indica­tive mod­el show­ing what can be done in Min­sky now

There is still a lot to do.

Many exist­ing fea­tures (such as group­ing) require addi­tion­al refine­ment, and many addi­tion­al fea­tures are needed–such as allow­ing direct entry of equa­tions, and adding Stock-Flow Con­sis­tent mod­el­ing tech­niques in addi­tion to the dou­ble-entry book­keep­ing checks that God­ley Tables already offer. We also only have an incom­plete help file, though that will be improved over the next cou­ple of months.

The pro­gram at present does not sup­port mul­ti­sec­toral analy­sis, and is only suit­able for mod­el­ing a sin­gle econ­o­my (or the abstrac­tion of a sin­gle glob­al econ­o­my). These two exten­sions are planned, and will of course require addi­tion­al fund­ing which I will seek in the future.

But for now it works very well as a free tool for sys­tem dynam­ics in gen­er­al, and a spe­cial­ized tool for mon­e­tary macro­eco­nom­ic mod­el­ing in par­tic­u­lar. Please give it a work­out.