The Friede Garde Prize Lectures
The Friede Garde Prize Lectures
Lecture 01: Fiat And Credit Money
This YouTube video builds a model of a mixed fiat-credit economy in about 30 minutes. If you’d like to follow along, download Minsky from https://sourceforge.net/projects/minsky/ and install it as you watch the video.
Lecture 02: Falling Marginal Cost is the Empirical Rule
One of the many signs of the disconnect between Neoclassical economics and the natural world is the theory of supply and demand, which has rising marginal cost meeting falling marginal revenue to determine both quantity and price.
A century's worth of empirical research has shown that real-world firms have constant or falling marginal cos—not the rising marginal cost fantasy of textbooks--because, thank god, factories are designed by engineers rather than by economists.
Lecture 03: The Market Demand Curve
The vision of consumers as utility-maximizers and the downward sloping market demand curve—so that the quantity demanded of a product rises as its price falls—both seem so plausible.
But the former has been contradicted by a very well-structured experiment. At the same time, the latter cannot be derived mathematically without incorporating income distribution as a fundamental aspect of economics—and Neoclassical microeconomics ignores income distribution.
Workshop 04: From Goodwin To Minsky
Lecture 05: Energy In Production Functions
Neoclassical and Post Keynesian economic models have been "energy blind": postulating output from inputs of Technology, Labor, and Capital but ignoring energy (and matter, for that matter...).
In this lecture, I show how tautological and wrong the Cobb-Douglas Production Function is and that incorporating energy does enormous damage to the Neoclassical paradigm. On the other hand, the empirically-based Leontief Production Function only needs to acknowledge that what has been called the "Capital-Output Ratio" is the inverse of "the efficiency with which machinery turns energy into useful work" and Post-Keynesian economic models are now energy-aware.
Workshop 05: Combined Godley-Flowchart Model
Previous models have been either Godley Table or flowchart models. The full power of Minsky comes from integrating the two, with the flowchart method covering physical production and the Godley Tables enabling these to be integrated with financial flows.
Lecture 06: Method And (the lack of Scientific) Revolutions in Economics
Economics remains pre-scientific because, while Planck said, "science advances one funeral at a time", for economics, funerals alone aren't enough.
NOTE: More lectures will be added as they are released.