A call for young computer scientists to help fix economics

I read this astonishing book a couple of weeks ago:

Steve Keen is a "post-Keynesian" (i.e. dissident) economist; the world is mostly run by economists who  promote the "neoclassical" model.

The problems with the neoclassical model are several:

• It does not represent such fundamentals as money, debt or banks
• It doesn't use sophisticated enough math to represent the forces in play in the actual economy
• It assumes reversion to "equilibrium" which of course the actual economy does not

The neoclassical economists control most academic departments and serve in most high government positions. (U.S chairman of the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are both advocates of the neoclassical theory, for example).

Dr. Keen and his dissident colleagues are working to overthrow the neoclassical model with representations of the economy that better represent the actual world economy. They've made a good start on this; the graph of the model in this book against the graph of the actual economy is a close match.

But to continue the work they need young Ph.D students who understand math and computer science well enough to extend these software-based models to even better accuracy and usefulness.

I emailed Dr. Keen a couple of days ago; he responded that he and his colleagues are accepting applications for students. Dr. Keen lives in Australia, but there's a U.S. conference coming up the end of September with all the relevant players:

http://www.internationalpostkeynesianconference.org/

Unfortunately I didn't find out about the conference until the registration deadline of September 1 was already here. But if this post or the book at all light you up the way they did me, you could get in touch with Dr. Keen at "debunking at gmail dot com" and/or get ahold of the conference proceedings when they are published and track down other post-Keynesians from that source.

You can also download and try a version of the model.

Think about it! We don't tolerate 19th-century physics or 19th-century biology; especially after its abject failure the last 5 years why do we tolerate 19th-century economics?