I love Steve Keen's accent, it's kind of old fashioned London even through he's Australian. Hey, maybe one day I will meet him for a pint in a Wetherspoon 's.
We humans love round numbers. I didn't note my 10th Patron (that came sometime during day 1 of my Patreon campaign), nor the 100th, but the 1,000th Patron, about 20 months after I started my campaign in February of 2017, is a milestone well worth celebrating. So thank you to all of you, and welcome to the community Naiem.
The initial reason for starting this campaign was to raise funds to provide continuous development funds for Minsky, the Open Source system dynamics program that I designed and developed in concert with Dr Russell Standish. Minsky had first been developed thanks to a $128,000 grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking in 2012, and only another crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter enabled it to get to a usable state by raising another $78,000. I had given up on getting research funding from the usual channels, since these are dominated by Neoclassical gatekeepers who had always rejected my applications. Patreon, with its continuous funding model, seemed an ideal vehicle.
Then I was told that, thanks to the impact of yet another Neoliberal deform (not a typo) of Higher Education, Kingston had to downsize severely. I would either need to teach 4 times as much, or go on 1/4 pay.
A fourfold increase in my teaching load would have wiped out my ability to campaign for the reform of economics, so I said I'd take the 1/4 option and take my chances with Patreon.
If Patreon hadn't worked, I would have returned to Australia to live--since the UK's tax rules hit me with the top marginal tax rate when I access my superannuation savings here. My campaign to reform economics would have become a part-time activity during my retirement.
Well thanks to you all, it's worked. I can now afford to remain in Europe indefinitely, which is fabulous since it's the epicenter of the student revolts against mainstream economics, and economic debate here is far sharper than in the USA, let alone than in Australia.
No comments:
Post a Comment