Minsky is, and will remain, Open Source software. I will also always post the latest version of Minsky here too, for Windows and Apple PC (see the uploads at the end of this post). But though the Open Source repositories SourceForge and Github will continue to host the source-code for Minsky, no binaries will be posted there past the current version (version 2.10).

For new binaries, the SourceForge and Github Minsky pages will direct users to a new Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/hpcoder.

The reasons for this move is simple: to raise development funding, and to build a user community.

Funding

Minsky has never received funding from the conventional research funding bodies like the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), or Australia’s Australian Research Council (ARC). This is simply because, with about 80% of academic economists being Neoclassical, virtually 100% of the referees are Neoclassical. Non-orthodox projects like Minsky haven’t got a chance.

All Minsky‘s funding to date has come from just four sources:

The Institute for New Economic Thinking ($128,000) in 2012;
A Kickstarter campaign ($78,000) in 2013;
A grant from Kingston University (£20,000) in 2017; and
Personal funding from me (about $20,000) and several of my supporters (about $50,000) over the last seven years.

That’s about $300,000, which is peanuts in software development terms. Despite this, Minsky is already a very innovative tool for system dynamics in general, and economic and monetary dynamics in particular. Each month, between 200 and 400 people download it from SourceForge.

Figure 1: Monthly downloads of Minsky since January 2018

What we are hoping is that at least 50-100 of those each month will be willing to pay $1 a month via Patreon to do so. The money raised will then employ Russell to maintain and extend the program.

I don’t expect anyone who’s supporting me on Patreon right now to sign up (though I wouldn’t object either!). You’re already supporting me here, and that’s more than enough. We just hope that users who are curious enough to download Minsky will also be curious enough to pay $1 a month (plus the VAT overhead!) to help us continue to develop it.

I give my time to develop Minsky for free of course—thanks to support I get from my Patrons already. But as a self-employed programmer, Russell has to earn a living, and he charges about US$100 an hour for his time.

Given Russell’s skills in programming, mathematics, big data, physics, and complex systems, this is a bargain.

I’ll never forget one telling incident on this front.

In my second-last year at the University of Western Sydney, a top notch young computer science student signed up for my course on Behavioural Economics and Finance: Nathan Moses. His essay was a C++ written, DOS-based, multi-agent simulation of monetary dynamics. It was so good that (a) I got him to give a lecture to the class on it, and (b) I gave him 22 out of 20 for his essay.

The next year, Nathan started a computer-science-degree project with two other friends to port Minsky to the Web, and wrote a user interface in which multiple people could work simultaneously on the same model. It worked, although there wasn’t time to add the underlying ODE engine beneath the GUI. But it was so good that I hoped to hire Nathan (& Kevin Pereira) if I got enough funding on Kickstarter.

That didn’t come to pass, but for a while during the Kickstarter campaign, we were collaborating on Minsky, and Nathan and Kevin checked out Russell’s existing code, just in case I could raise the funds to employ them.

Nathan walked into our next meeting and said, and I quote: “I used to think I was a hotshot C++ programmer until I saw Russell’s code”.

A User Community

Patreon also offers two advantages that aren’t available on the Open Source repositories: the capacity for users to interact with other users, and to get some feedback from myself and Russell; and the capacity for us to know who has downloaded Minsky, and over time, to find out whether, why and how they’re using it. Downloads from SourceForge are completely anonymous, and all we know is metadata—how many people have downloaded it, from which countries, using which operating systems.

With a Patreon page, there is a capacity for discussion between users, as there is on this site, plus feedback to myself and Russell (we’ll be co-administrators of that site, though all of the funding will go to him to work on Minsky.

I’ll let you all know when the new Patreon page for Minsky goes live. The rest of this post is here just to provide graphics to use the page: images on Patreon must come from a website, so I’m placing them here so that we can link to them from the new page.

Figure 2: Basic Keen model of Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis