The Science of Economics Laboratory
The Science of Economics Laboratory
Economics rebuilt as a modelling science — the monetary system dynamics of Steve Keen, coupled to the energy-constrained agent-based models of Garvin Boyle.
tsoel.ac
Two modelling traditions
Keen · system dynamics
Ẏ = f(Y, D, w) — monetary, nonlinear
Banks create money by lending, so private debt drives demand — and a capitalist economy is inherently cyclical and crisis-prone. Keen models it as coupled nonlinear differential equations (Minsky, built with Russell Standish), where the Great Moderation’s calm was the prelude to breakdown, not proof of stability. Equilibrium is an assumption the data rejects.
Fisher · Minsky · Godley · Keen · Standish
Boyle · agent-based
Σ agents | dS ≥ 0 — thermodynamic budget
Boyle builds the economy from the bottom up: many autonomous agents transacting under a hard energy budget, where the second law — not utility — bounds what the system can do. His biophysical, agent-based models (Orrery Software) put exergy, entropy and the sustainability of an industrial civilisation at the centre, where neoclassical economics leaves them out.
Lotka · Georgescu-Roegen · Ayres · Boyle
Coupled, they are one science: a top-down monetary dynamics and a bottom-up thermodynamic one, describing the same object — an economy that must balance its books and its energy. The lab’s job is to make that coupling runnable, reproducible, and machine-checkable.
The method
A theory you can’t execute is a narrative. The lab builds composable, categorical models where the double-entry accounting invariant is enforced by the data structure itself — one specification mapped to many coherent semantics, so the same model yields a simulation, a steady state, and a calibration.
Why a laboratory
Equilibrium is an assumption. Dynamics is a measurement.
Mainstream models assume the economy sits at rest and returns there when disturbed. The evidence — debt cycles, energy shocks, ecological overshoot — is of a system far from equilibrium. TSOEL treats that seriously: build the model, run it, reproduce it, and couple the money it counts to the energy it burns. It is the computational engine of the research programme.
What the lab is for
The research programme argues the economy is a far-from-equilibrium dissipative structure that selects its way toward a viability boundary it cannot price. That is a claim about the world — and a claim has to be testable.
TSOEL is where it gets tested. Keen gives the monetary dynamics, Boyle gives the energy-constrained agents, and the lab couples them into models that can be run against data and handed to anyone to re-run. Theory upstream; measurement here.
The umbrella
The research programme
The research programme that puts these nodes in context and coordinates the primary research.
rsorourke.com →Research
The programme →
Thesis, foundations, and the open modelling problems.
Build
The models →
Composable, categorical tooling over the Minsky lineage.
Read
Papers →
The Keen reproduction, the coupling probe, the wedge.
Umbrella
The research programme →
The programme this laboratory serves.