QED stand for “Quesnay Economic Dynamics”. It is a new software program that implements my tabular method of developing differential equations.
I am currently working on a second edition of Debunking Economics, and an entry on QED will form part of that book. When I have written that chapter, I will add the information from it to this page, with documentation, example files, and the like. For the meantime, if you’d like to try QED out then click on the image below to download the ZIP file containing the program.
Note: the zip file doesn’t download properly in Internet Explorer. It downloads fine however in Google Chrome. I expect it will also download well in other browsers like Firefox. So if you only have IE on your computer, try to download but if it gives you an invalid archive message, please install another browser instead and then download from within it.
Quesnay Economic Dynamics
To run it, extract the file to a subdirectory and then double click on the file QED.EXE. This loads the basic interface:
To test run the program, choose File/Open and select the model “FreeBankingModel.sgr”. This is the first model developed in this paper. To see the model itself, click on the “Actions” menu item and select “Quesnay Table”. This table will then appear:
To run the model, click on the “Phillips Diagram” menu item on the main QED program window, which will show the following dynamic flowchart that was generated by this table:
Now click on the “Show Player” checkbox at the top of the window, and a player will appear down the bottom. Click on “Play” and the amounts in the reservoirs (bank accounts) and flow valves (labelled A to I and with the same descriptors as in the left hand column of the Quesnay Table) will change. If you run it for five years (watch the “MODELTIME” counter in the top right hand side of the diagram and click on Stop), you should see the following:
The equations in the model are stored in two other tables accessible from the “Actions” menu item on the main window: “Var/Equations” and “C.O.D. Equations” respectively. The former gives values to parameters and the like; the latter gives the equations for the flows between the accounts:
There’s a lot more to the program, but that will have to do for now. To my knowledge it’s the only program around that uses a tabular interface to develop dynamic models, and also provides seamless each-way development of a systems engineering diagram (the “Forrester Diagram” menu item that I haven’t mentioned yet) from a table of equations. It is ideally suited to modelling financial flows, and it’s my and my collaborator’s contribution to helping the world understand how money works–which is the first step in understanding why our financial system has performed so badly and given us the GFC.
