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I want to welcome you to this virtual conference on the occasion of a decade since Wynne Godley’s passing. I want to thank all the speakers for their willingness to either share their memories they...

A revisionist view of economic history now holds that New Deal legislation that, in particular, enabled unionization in the early 1930s seriously prolonged the Great Depression. The freshwater econ...

U.S. economy has performed well over the past several years compared to what we have come to expect in recent decades, but it is far from the best it can be. The unemployment rate of 4.2 percent is the lowest since the 1960s, but in the midst of the longest peacetime expansion in the nation's history, it is nearly double rates that were common in the 1950s. In addition to the number of unemployed, millions are underemployed and millions more are officially out of the labor force but would work if a job were available. Of those who have full-time jobs, many earn wages below the poverty line. In good economic times, people forget about business cycles, but this expansion will eventually turn to recession. Poverty, joblessness, and underemployment will again increase. Although no

The work of Hyman Minsky represents an important link between Post Keynesians and Institutionalists. This essay begins with a brief summary of Minsky's early work, including his well-known financial instability hypothesis and his policy proposals designed to reform the financial system. It then moves on to discuss other proposals that are less well known, and developed after the publication of his Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (1986) book. One of them in all the work of Minsky is his demand that theory be institution-specific. Because there are a variety of possible types of economies, theory must be appropriate to the specific economy under analysis. His analysis concerned an evolving, developed, big-government capitalist economy with complex and long-lived financial arrangements. His policy recommendations were designed to promote a successful, democratic form of capitalism given these financial arrangements. These policies would have to ‘constrain’ instability through creation of institutional ‘ceili...

(1997). The Institutional Prerequisites for Successful Capitalism. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 493-500.

Hyman P. Minsky (September 23, 1919-October 24, 1996) was the outstanding financial Keynesian of our time. He began his career as a professional economist in 1949, when he joined the economics faculty of Brown University. He learned economics during his undergraduate years from the University of Chicago "greats" that included Paul Douglas, Oscar Lange, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Jacob Viner, and his close friend Gerhard Meyer, who was always available to explain what was not clear, and later at Harvard from Alvin Hansen, Wassily Leontief, and Joseph Schumpeter. The combined views of Hansen, who believed that the behavior of a market economy could be controlled by aggregate interventions, Simons, who believed that the efficiency and efficacy of aggregate interventions depended on market structures, and Lange, who was convinced that policy-oriented thinking and formulation need not consider allocation and accumulation issues simultaneously, formed the basis of Hy's research program. In developing the "financial fragility" paradigm, Minsky was especially influenced by Henry Simons. As Minsky saw it, in emphasizing the importance of the organization of production in a market economy, Simons implicitly advocated the need for a financial structure that would ensure the dynamic nature of the economic system. Hy became well-known as the author of four influential books, including John Maynard Keynes [1975], an incisive study of the "great man," Stabilizing an Unstable Economy [1986], and a score of articles in academic journals and the financial press. He was uncomfortable with ideological labels since on one hand, he