On Jan­u­ary 31, we will bid good­bye to chair­man Ben Bernanke and say hel­lo to chair­man Janet Yellen. Most com­men­tary has focused on what Yellen’s ascen­dan­cy might mean for the Fed­er­al Reserve and the US econ­o­my, but today I’d like to con­sid­er how Bernanke’s lega­cy might he be regard­ed in future years — say, 70 years after the cri­sis we’re in now.

It cer­tain­ly won’t be as he expect­ed it to be before he took on the job of Fed chair­man in Feb­ru­ary 2006. In the worst case sce­nario, he will be blamed for caus­ing the ‘Great Reces­sion’, just as he blamed his pre­de­ces­sors for caus­ing the Great Depres­sion.

To sup­port Source­Forge’s Project of the Month fea­tur­ing Min­sky, here are some sam­ple Min­sky mod­els. To down­load them, right click and choose “save as”–otherwise they will open in a sep­a­rate brows­er win­dow as XML files.

I’ve also made a playlist of 8 short videos show­ing some of the fea­tures of Min­sky. Those videos are also linked at the bot­tom of this post.

General Dynamic Models

• Sin func­tion
• Sin and oth­er func­tions
• Sim­ple har­mon­ic oscil­la­tor
• Preda­tor-prey (pop­u­la­tions not yet linked)
• Anoth­er Preda­tor-Prey
• Lorenz Attrac­tor
• Lorenz Attrac­tor with shock para­me­ter
• Henon Attrac­tor
• Rossler

Source­Forge is one of the main devel­op­ment and repos­i­to­ry sites for Open Source soft­ware, and late last year their com­mu­ni­ty vot­ed to make Min­sky its Project of the Month for Jan­u­ary 2014.

We (myself and Dr Rus­sell Stan­dish, who is the chief pro­gram­mer for Min­sky) were delight­ed of course: it’s a pub­lic affir­ma­tion that the project is use­ful and respect­ed by a very crit­i­cal audi­ence: oth­er devel­op­ers of Open Source soft­ware. Here is the inter­view Source­Forge con­duct­ed with us, which is pub­lished on its blog.

Source­Forge: Tell us about the Min­sky project please…

I was going to write a ret­ro­spec­tive on Ben Bernanke this week, since his tenure as Fed­er­al Reserve chair­man ends soon, and it’s time to look back on his peri­od in office – as he him­self did on his pre­de­ces­sors dur­ing the Great Depres­sion. But a far more impor­tant depar­ture occurred last week: the Ital­ian econ­o­mist Pro­fes­sor Augus­to Graziani died at the age of 80.

Augus­to who, you may ask? Graziani’s name is not wide­ly known even among econ­o­mists, let alone the gen­er­al pub­lic, because he was out­side the neo­clas­si­cal main­stream – and also out­side con­ti­nen­tal Amer­i­ca, which has a pseu­do-monop­oly on fame in eco­nom­ics these days. His Wikipedia entry empha­sis­es his cur­rent obscu­ri­ty: it is a mere stub.

I’m sor­ry, I could­n’t help it: when Lar­ry Sum­mers first made his sec­u­lar stag­na­tion speech at the IMF, and the Amer­i­can eco­nom­ics tribe her­ald­ed it as if it were the great­est (and lat­est) thing since sliced bread, my irony gene went into overload—and that showed in my first post on the top­ic. The argu­ment that the West has been suf­fer­ing from sec­u­lar stag­na­tion, and that only a series of finan­cial bub­bles have kept the illu­sion of pros­per­i­ty going, has been part of non-ortho­dox eco­nom­ics for over three decades.

Blog­ging on eco­nom­ics and the ecol­o­gy are not nec­es­sar­i­ly eco­nom­ic propo­si­tions, but many of those who do it com­menced for phil­an­thropic rea­sons, rather than finan­cial. One of the plea­sures of blog­ging for me has been meet­ing such peo­ple, and one of my favourites is Nicole Foss, who main­tains the Auto­mat­ic Earth site.

Nicole has just released a new 4 hour video pre­sen­ta­tion enti­tled Fac­ing the Future, co-pre­sent­ed with Lau­rence Boomert and avail­able from the Auto­mat­ic Earth Store. If you’re look­ing for a thought pro­vok­ing gift, or some­thing to stim­u­late your own brain cells over the Fes­tive Sea­son, con­sid­er pur­chas­ing Nicole’s video and help­ing keep the Auto­mat­ic Earth oper­at­ing in 2014.

The fol­low­ing short inter­view has been post­ed on the “Eco­nom­ics in Debate” web­site in The Nether­lands.

“Keen then goes on to assert that lend­ing is, by def­i­n­i­tion (at least as I under­stand it), an addi­tion to aggre­gate demand. I guess I don’t get that at all. If I decide to cut back on my spend­ing and stash the funds in a bank, which lends them out to some­one else, this doesn’t have to rep­re­sent a net increase in demand. Yes, in some (many) cas­es lend­ing is asso­ci­at­ed with high­er demand, because resources are being trans­ferred to peo­ple with a high­er propen­si­ty to spend; but Keen seems to be say­ing some­thing else, and I’m not sure what. I think it has some­thing to do with the notion that cre­at­ing mon­ey = cre­at­ing demand, but again that isn’t right in any mod­el I under­stand.” (Min­sky and Method­ol­o­gy (Wonk­ish), March 27, 2012)

Last week I vis­it­ed the stu­dents who have start­ed the Post Crash Eco­nom­ics Soci­ety at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­si­ty, and took part in a debate on the top­ic of “Should (and could) eco­nom­ics have pre­dict­ed the eco­nom­ic cri­sis?” with Peter Backus. The soci­ety will release a video of the talk at some point, but in the mean­time here is my pre­sen­ta­tion.

Eight years ago, in Decem­ber 2005, I began warn­ing of an impend­ing eco­nom­ic cri­sis that would com­mence when the rate of growth of pri­vate debt start­ed to fall. My warn­ings hit a pop­u­lar chord: jour­nal­ists through­out the world picked it up and pub­li­cised my views – as well as sim­i­lar argu­ments from Nouriel Roubi­ni, Dean Bak­er, Ann Pet­ti­for, Michael Hud­son, Wynne God­ley, and a few oth­ers.

But our argu­ments were ignored by the eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sion because, accord­ing to main­stream eco­nom­ic the­o­ry, pri­vate debt should have no impact on aggre­gate demand. As Bernanke put it, lend­ing sim­ply trans­fers spend­ing pow­er from lender to bor­row­er, and “pure redis­tri­b­u­tions should have no sig­nif­i­cant macro-eco­nom­ic effects” (Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depres­sion, p. 24).