Research Funding

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I have just added a Word­Press Wid­get that enables a dona­tion to sup­port my research. I’ll add some­thing more sophisticated–and informative–at a lat­er date, but this will do in the inter­im. Here it is below.

It’s very easy to use: just click on the menu to choose an amount to donate, enter your email address, and click “Donate”. This will take you to Pay­Pal, where the pay­ment is made (either through your exist­ing account, or one you can set up on the spot). The drop down menu tells you how much research time you have financed, as I explain below.

Why should you fund my research?

As you might guess, my com­men­taries on debt on this site are backed up by a non-ortho­dox the­o­ry of eco­nom­ics, the most rel­e­vant com­po­nent of which is Min­sky’s “Finan­cial Insta­bil­i­ty Hypoth­e­sis”. I have done this research with absolute­ly no fund­ing to date from the ARC or any oth­er sim­i­lar research fund­ing author­i­ty, and only one sub­stan­tial grant from UWS (of $20,000) when I topped UWS’s researchers in point scores for the ARC in 1998 (I did­n’t get fund­ing, where­as the six non-eco­nom­ics UWS researchers who ranked below me were; fun­ny that…).

Giv­en that debt-defla­tion is the eco­nom­ic issue of our times, it is vital that we devel­op an under­stand­ing of the process­es that lead to it, and what might be done to over­come it. I have devot­ed my aca­d­e­m­ic life to study­ing the dynam­ics of debt, which is why I was able to iden­ti­fy that this cri­sis was coming–when neo­clas­si­cal econ­o­mists thought that we were instead enjoy­ing “The Great Mod­er­a­tion”, I saw that a new Great Depres­sion was immi­nent.

But pre­science is not enough. If we are to sur­vive what may well be the great­est eco­nom­ic chal­lenge we have ever faced, we need an eco­nom­ic the­o­ry that ful­ly under­stands its dynamics–and that mod­el needs to sup­plant the neo­clas­si­cal non­sense that helped get us into this mess in the first place.

In mid-2010, I will start work on the book Finance and Eco­nom­ic Break­down.  Research funds raised from this site will be used to buy relief from teach­ing so that I can focus exclu­sive­ly on that book, and the eco­nom­ic mod­el­ling need­ed to sup­port it.

In com­mon with most aca­d­e­mics in Aus­tralia, I am “time poor” for doing my research because our teach­ing loads have expand­ed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the last two decades, and the time we have avail­able for research has shrunk in con­se­quence.

It is also extreme­ly dif­fi­cult to get research fund­ing for time off from oth­er activ­i­ties, because fund­ing bod­ies like the ARC main­tain the fic­tion that our work­loads leave us with time for research, and all we real­ly need fund­ing for are spe­cif­ic research aides like spe­cial hard­ware, research staff, etc. So fre­quent­ly requests for teach­ing relief are pared back, even when grants are suc­cess­ful.

I’ve now mod­i­fied the Dona­tions wid­get so that it express­es the amount of time off from non-research duties that the dona­tion will enable me to fund. Since I need to pro­vide the uni­ver­si­ty with an amount equiv­a­lent to the base salary for my aca­d­e­m­ic lev­el (“D” on the Aus­tralian 5 point aca­d­e­m­ic scale, with E being the high­est), mul­ti­plied by an on-costs load­ing of 27%, I would need to raise A$133,500 to pur­chase an entire year’s research time. At the stan­dard require­ment of a 48 week work­ing year and 37.5 hours work per week , my basic hourly cost is A$74 per hour.

As a result, a dona­tion of $10–the min­i­mum allowed by the widget–purchases 8 min­utes of my research time, while the max­i­mum I’ve allowed for (A$5,000) pur­chas­es 67 hours. So on that basis the dona­tion lev­els I’ve spec­i­fied in the wid­get trans­late as the fol­low­ing amount of my time:

• Lev­el 1 ($10): 8 Min­utes
• Lev­el 2 ($50): 40 Min­utes
• Lev­el 3 ($100): 81 Min­utes
• Lev­el 4 ($250): 1/2 Day
• Lev­el 5 ($500): 1 Day
• Lev­el 6 ($5,000): 2 Weeks

These fig­ure are of course myth­i­cal: most Aus­tralian aca­d­e­mics work more than the required 1725 hours per year, and I cer­tain­ly do. I’m prob­a­bly putting in about 70 hours a week right now, with no more than 2 weeks com­plete­ly off work each year, or about 3,500 hours a year. So in fact the dona­tions have “dou­ble the bang” for the buck.

I am also eli­gi­ble for sab­bat­i­cal leave next year, so quite pos­si­bly half the above amounts will, in con­cert with 6 months time for research giv­en by sab­bat­i­cal leave, give me a year off to work on Finance and Eco­nom­ic Break­down.

I’ll expand this page over the sum­mer months in Aus­tralia to include a lot more of the analy­sis that backs up my Debt­watch Report.