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Presenting The 70 Year Old Hydraulic Computer Used By Central Planners To "Visualize Economy"
Meet MONIAC - Monetary National Income Analogue Computer - the 7-foot-tall, 70-year-old 'Rube Goldberg' hydraulic contraption that was the machine that analyzed data, simulated the economy, and made predictions about the future for the central planners of yore...
There was a time when computers ran on water.
No, really. They did. Check out the video above, a recent demonstration of a machine called the MONIAC, originally built in 1949. The MONIAC—short for Monetary National Income Analogue Computer—was a machine that analyzed economic data using, yes, hydraulics. Basically, it pumped water through pipes and tanks in an effort to simulate an economy and make predictions about its future.
The seven-foot-tall Rube Goldberg contraption may seem like a strange way to handle economic calculations, especially given that—ahem—drier computers of day could handle similar tasks. But as computer historian Doron Swade explains in an article for Inc., Phillips wanted a way to visualize the economy, and in those days, computers didn’t have monitors.
Only about 14 MONIACs were made. Most of them are corroding in university basements around the world, but there are at least two working order, one at the Reserve Bank Museum in New Zealand and another at the University of Cambridge. The video above is an excerpt from a MONIAC demonstration by Cambridge engineering professor Allan McRobie, who restored the university’s machine a few years ago.
The machine’s various tanks and flows represent different parts of an economy, such as banks, consumer spending, personal savings, taxes, foreign holdings, and more. As McRobie explains, if you find that the personal savings tank is getting too full and you want to encourage more investment, you can simulate a drop in interest rates by widening the bank’s valve so that money flows more freely through the system.
* * *
We have certainly come a long way since then... as central planners have refined economic 'management' to one simple rule:
If S&P 500 Futures are down, Slam The VIX (which creates wealth, jobs, and Venezuelan utopia)
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Sabine Lautenschlaeger
bwa ah ah
Their numbers are all wet.
Sabine Lautenschlaeger and Janet Yellen doing the wild thang. BWA AH AH!!!
PS I wonder just when the very first "cracks" in the facade will appear when the bankers and policy makers start panicking royally (Panic Royale) when the wonderfully stimulative impact of lower energy and attendant commodity prices translates in to no growth in economic activity and the Specter (Thought Bonds, QE's Bonds defeated that evil villain) of deflation surges worrying Those Who Think Their Thoughts and Wishes Must Be Believed and Obeyed start shitting bricks about the inability to repay debt in a deflationary environment and QE2Infinity starts again.
Huh?
What about you?
the fed will buy any failing bonds the banks may hold. the rest will go "mark to fantasy" and never be heard from again. problem solved.
Market is more fluid than this computer can handle.
No problem with flow with that thing.
Clearly superior to the Fed.
Keynes did support a gold standard in WW 1 btw
Loves we that AnalOG computing power.
0 1 ......burp!
If you set it to zero and then negative interest rates does it blow up just like real economy?
As an old engineer, the very thought of a hydraulic computer makes me want to fondle myself.
"AH! Yes Fraulein, steam punk me NOW!"
Er..., uh..., no, no, it's okay. I'm better now. Sorry.
There was also a functional one on display at the Deutches Museum in Muenchen as of about a dozen years ago. It's quite a sight to behold.
This is an ideal example of an analog computer. The water is analog to the currency...liquidity.
I am Chumbawamba.
Take the federal reserve staff down to the machine, push their faces into the glass and inform them 'See! This is how the money really flows.. now stop this shit!'
Probably worth mentioning that this machine was based on economic research from an Economist who was famous for finding a correlation between inflation and employment. (Increasing inflation leads to increasing employment.)
This has since been debunked as a spurious correlation by their betters, like Friedman. My guess is this machine is about as informative as rectal cancer.
Sort of, hydraulics are closed systems.
What happens when you NEED MOAR liquidity?
(and you know the fuckers always need moar)
Simple: there is an opening at the top where you can pour in more liquidity (and a drain at the bottom to do the opposite).
-Chumblez.
Unfortunately, they opened the spigots too wide and full steamed ahead into an unnoticed iceberg and tanked their economic model to the bottom of the sea.
Here is their hydraulic model in it's most basic operating form. Scroll down just a little to see the figure.
http://www.ozskier.com/mmp/2005/11/03/
First cracks???? This fucking theater looks like it needs a gallon of visine...
yeah, I think they are going to be more active/proactive in direct buying of commodities/equities like they do now under the table...cut to the quick if you will...ie. USG "investing" GM....moral hazard is past tense...... savvy.....gold's future not so much....mad max is for the cartoons....mexico analogue more likely
Remember don't vote don't bitch!!!! muhahahahahahaha
We have laggards ouiji board now. What a Barbaras relic
lagarde or the ouiji board?
Martin Armstrong added three extra spigots to that bitch!!
Venezuelan utopia? I want some! http://www.businessinsider.com/long-food-lines-are-in-venezuela-2014-2
I don't think the advent of monitors are helping them visualize anything but porn over there.
/
Flow matters!
Liquidity, bitchez.
Après nous, le déluge.
The Red Shield runs the whole thing and they are the men behind the curtain. Camrbridge + Oxford = Oxbridge = wankers who ru(i)n the UK.
I wonder if they use turds to float around the glass pipes to siimulate modern financial instruments like derivatives, liar loans and ninja mortgages?
Ironicallly, the predictions do not appear to be any more accurate.
There's good idea hiding in that bizarre contraption (the mathematics of fluid dynamics for economic modeling) but I guess they involved some economists and fucked everything up...
What do hydraulic MONIAC (spelled eerily like Maniac), neo-Keynesian (or Kenyan) economists and kinky sex have in common?
They're all like enemas.
Wet, smelly, dysfunctional and highly unpleasant
Monica?
I wouldn 't put the kinky sex in that department ! :-)
Well if they wanted to make it really accurate to today's model, take a 12 gauge shot gun drop about 25 rounds into the machine all over the place, and then see where all the colored water dye ends up..
The monkey's are doing their best man!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNW30bLTP0Y
High Frequency Trading Computers can now sell a billion dollars worth of gold in a nanosecond or $10 billion worth of oil in a microsecond. That permits the Fed to control all markets, wage economic war on USA's adversaries like Russia, keep interest rates low with trillions printed, and arrive at economic nirvana. How long this nirvana will last, no one knows.
Until the instant the dollar is no longer the reserve currency...
It will last until Friday, Jan 20, 2017
Algos will be floating like crazy
It's all about business.....global business
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/daily-updates-iran-is-already-open-for-western-business/
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/chinas-industrial-and-commercial-bank-creates-offshore-yuan-center-in-los-angeles/
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/u-s-using-russian-rocket-engines-to-launch-spy-satelites/
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com/2014/11/21/u-s-chevron-enter-joint-project-with-russias-lukoil-in-nigeria/
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com/2014/11/29/russias-rosneft-buys-french-oil-refinery-from-total/
http://newworldorderg20.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/jpmorgans-deal-with-gazprom-cements-thier-relationship-of-course/
This is from the Onion, right?
Or Mad Magazine, which was always funnier.
It's like an economic Iron Lung.
Climb in. Breathe easy.
Interesting. It appears that there are no automatic feedback mechanisms, just manual adjustments. Not sure I'd call it a computer, more like a fluid model calculator, maybe similar to the artillery numeric calculators that were installed in some Destroyers after WWII. But it does betray the concept that Central Planners view things like interest rates, etc as knobs which can be turned in order to "adjust" the machine of the real economy. I suppose you'd need to believe that kind of perspective in order to feel like you mattered.
I doubt it was meant to compute much of anything but tried to model the dynamic response of the financial system to various controls.
I bet it would explode all over in a few seconds given the current economic "state vector" and control settings!
It's an analog computer. The whole thing is built on feedback, which is much easier to do in that mode.
If you have never used an analog computer, I can understand where you missed that...
Terry Pratchett featured this thing in one of his discworld books which was about economics. Mises also gets a mention. Ironically he favours Keynesianism.
Maybe he'll get to see the results before he kicks the bucket, giving a lie to the saying that "in the long term we are all dead" (and therefore it doesn't matter).
Bravo css and Pratchett reference.
I believe it was 'The Color of Money'
Though ' Thud ' is what we are coming to, metaphorically.
For Keynes and his friends now is the long run and they are all dead. Too bad we are still here, left holding the bag.
Off-topic:
BussinessInsider has a story saying that Putin made desperate appeal to the EU.
http://www.businessinsider.com/russia-asks-eu-to-lift-sanctions-2014-11
My answer to them:
"Putin asked for nothing, requested support.
Half of my blood is Slavic, understand Putin's speech as a final warning before taking the decision to close the gas logs to Europe.
Do not celebrate, contains six months from the registry fechameto and Europe will turn the chaos, the US also, all trade estancará.
BussinessInsider close the doors for lack of US government subsidy.
All will be unemployed.
hehe "
I'm pretty sure this comment will be ignored but here is the record.
:-)
Well, that explains it. Water pretty much comes from thin air so that's where they got the idea. Sure wish they had stopped using the thing when it broke down though.
The MONIAC has been replaced with 1,000 tapeworms, 10,000 leeches, and a couple monkeys hitting "Ctrl + P" to get bananas.
And yet there are still mathematical economists that are only a couple of equations short of this.
When human being start mimicking the behavior of rocks, then we can start using math to measure their behavior and predicts their decisions and outcomes. Until then... We're stuck explaining things using logic.
Central Banks don't rely on hydraulics. They rely on toilet plumbing, and the economic sewage they produce is the result.
The last "deposit" I made to my "gold and silver" savings account involved a boat sinking in the hydraulic fluid of a local lake.
The final device this monolithic computer [The MORONiac] connected to was a Toilet.....
My dad worked at an R&D facility back in the day and they had a large mechanical calculator that was wheeled around on a cart. The big prank was to put it outside of someone's cube, set it to divide by zero and walk away. It would make a great deal of noise while it computed endlessly.
Kuroda's masterplan is the iSuck.
The Hello Kitty Yellen-dildo variant that makes every friday a Black Friday.
They're still using the Saudiac.
At least markets used to be based on hydraulics, now they're based on nothing
who needs a Monetary National Income Analogue Computer when you have ctrl+p
turns out we are all rubes in the CB's rubiks cube.
I worked with an analogue electronics engineer in 2000. he was from the university of southampton UK. he modelled his power supply's and amplifiers in software as plumming equipment like that computer. A capacitor was modeled as a reservoir of water and a resistor as thinner connecting pipes. All I can say is every circuit he made worked. I don't think he ever did the economy. All his designs were spec'ed from begining with known ranges in current/voltage. Ofcourse anything outside these would likely yield unknown outcomes which is probably more like where we find ourselves in the economy of today.
It's like the high tech equivalent of witch doctors reading animal entrails.
I think the original name of the device was the Bullshit-a-ma-tron.
Hydraulic liquidity. Hydraulic QE to infinity.
economic fracking
well, before you start ridiculing it... lets see you build one tyler...oh wait, you build nothing but can criticize everything...so easy to open your trap and put out another negative hit piece bought and paid for by the short interest...
Shut the fuck up.... let's see you build an argument against the neo Bolsheviks...
Sounds like the machine in "Making Money" by Terry Pratchett. Not sure if his books are really fiction, after all . . .
This story would be funny if it wasn't true.
why would anyone want to model and predict (irrational) economic behavior?
just create the necessary conditions for humanity's continued self improvement.
step away and let it grow.
step in if help is needed.
new solutions must cast a wider net beyond an abstract economic system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB55mbwAmDE
Fuck that bullshit pseudoscience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=j0YOXVlPUu4#t=338
an analog computer can be fast and precise. pre 1950 it was the way to go.
That explains the language they use, flow, ease, flood the economy...all water based language similar to weather terminology is all war-based on TV news.
I want to leave an upper decker in that thing.
If they simulated today's leveraging, the machine would flood the room immediately.
Let the jokes about "trickle down economics' and waterboarding ...flow.
Needs a derivative tank
Finally, a practal use for snake oil
I guess 17 trillion wasn't enough money to buy a good computer?
Better get ready to change that to 18 trillion if you are talking about the national debt. This morning it sits just 40 billion shy of hitting the 18 trillion mark!
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2014/11/deficit-poised-to-top-18-trillion.html
And then they upgraded to the HAL 9000.
and it made a great cup of coffee too I bet
I don't see the tentacles that branch out and siphon the water from everyone else's tanks.
It's a bum model. We do it better now.
Predicting the future is an impossible task, a fools errand, full of pitfalls with or without the latest and best computers. Still we listen and soak in all that is said spending a tremendous amount of money to gain an edge in knowing what maybe just around the corner. If you step back ten years in your mind, I suspect that things have not unfolded as you might have predicted.
When you see how the world has developed, the twist and turns are most unpredictable. Nowhere is this more apparent then in the economy, whether it is in the areas of interest rates and inflation or the rise and fall of companies. Surprise and awe, highlighted with bouts of shock is what we should expect going forward. More on the subject of predictions in the article below.
http://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/06/predicting-future-and-hindsight-mirrors.html
If they just had a Flux capacitor...
If the main valve is supposed to control the volume of money in the system, and the system is an analogue of an economy, substituting Ohms law, where volume is amperage, velocity would be voltage and interest rates would be resistance... the drop in voltage is despite a flood of amperage, ie, liquidity, (volume). E over I,R... So the problem must be resistance, ie, regulation, incentives, taxes etc...
Um, so where is the negative fluid reservour labeled "debt"? Is it infinitely large?