Installation

To install Minsky on a Windows PC, double click on the MSI (“MicroSoft Installer”) file that you have downloaded from SourceForge. This will bring up the dialog box shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Installer dialog box for Minsky

Click on “Next” and you will see the license agreement dialog box:

Figure 2

Click on the “I accept the terms in the License Agreement” checkbox (this is a standard Open-Source license, involving no user fees) and the Next button will become available. Click on it, and the install destination dialog box appears.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Click on Install , and after a short delay, you screen should go blank, except for the form shown in Figure 5. Click on “Yes”, and the installation will commence.

Figure 5

When it finishes, you have one more dialog box to contend with—see Figure 6.

Figure 6

You are now ready to use Minsky . Press the Windows key on your keyboard to bring up the main Windows menu (or the equivalent on a Mac or Linux box), choose Minsky , and you’re ready to delve into the world of system dynamics and monetary modelling.

I urge you to not just read this book, but also to build the models in it yourself as you read it . Have this book open, physically or on screen, with Minsky on your computer, and create the models as you read. Ideally, you would be doing this in a workshop with a tutor guiding the process— something I used to do with my students at Kingston University. Especially now in the age of Covid, this isn’t possible—so it’s up to you to follow the instructions in this book, and then replicate them in your own Minsky models on your computer. You will doubtless make mistakes. But you will learn from mistakes and ultimately learn how to use Minsky to learn economics, and to create models of

your own, for your own purposes. This can range from just the fun of being able to simulate chaotic systems—see Figure 7—to building a robust, large-scale model of a national economy.[3]

Figure 7: The Lorenz model of turbulent flow in Minsky

You will also almost certainly encounter bugs, ranging from minor annoyances—such as, at present, text boxes for plots running outside the plot boundaries—to fatal crashes, where the program hangs and suddenly you find yourself staring at the desktop. There will, hopefully, be very few of the latter—the funding that we received from Friends Provident Foundation in 2018 has allowed us to dramatically improve the program’s stability, as well as to add numerous features. But they will happen nonetheless: bugs are a given in any computer software.

If you find a bug, please report it to the beta-testers list, which you can find at https://sourceforge.net/p/minsky/mailman/. The user groups that exist there are:

• minsky-betatesters: Subscribe | Archive | Search — A list for people who'd like to test beta versions of Minsky
• minsky-developer: Subscribe | Archive | Search
• minsky-users: Subscribe | Archive | Search — For topics related to general usage of Minsky

If you plan on being an active user of Minsky , please sign up to at least minsky-users and minskybetatesters . In the former you can get feedback and advice from other users; in the latter, you can report bugs (or feature requests) that will enable us to improve Minsky over time.

Finally, consider signing up to Minsky ’s page on Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/HPCODER. The minimum signup amount is US$1 per month (plus sales or value added taxes, which vary from country to country). Ideally, this would provide sufficient funds to enable Minsky ’s programmer Dr Russell Standish to work full-time maintaining and extending Minsky . At present (October 2021), it raises a small amount—$520 a month from 86 patrons. This at least covers Russell’s costs in producing compiled versions, which take about 4 hours to generate, but it’s a long way short of enabling him to work full-time on Minsky itself. I would prefer to see twenty times the revenue coming in, and forty times the number of Patrons. If you like using Minsky, and if this manual teaches you anything at all, please help make that wish come true.

Footnotes

3 The largest model made to date is a model of the Portuguese economy, constructed by the statistician Pedro Pratas during his Masters degree. He is now extending for his PhD which he commenced under me, and is completing under Yannis Dafermos at SOAS . The model is out of date and precedes many of the organisation and formatting improvements we’ve made to Minsky, but it still shows what is possible with Minsky . It is the file PortugalModelPedroPratas2019.mky in the ZIP file on my http://www.profstevekeen.com/minsky/ website: http://www.profstevekeen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/MinskyFigures.zip.