Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty Employer.pdfVIP

Working Paper No. 515 Minsky’s Approach to Employment Policy and Poverty: Employer of Last Resort and the War on Poverty by L. Randall Wray The Levy Economics Institute and University of Missouri–Kansas City September 2007 The Levy Economics Institute Working Paper Collection presents research in progress by Levy Institute scholars and conference participants. The purpose of the series is to disseminate ideas to and elicit comments from academics and professionals. The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, founded in 1986, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, independently funded research organization devoted to public service. Through scholarship and economic research it generates viable, effective public policy responses to important economic problems that profoundly affect the quality of life in the United States and abroad. The Levy Economics Institute P.O. Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 Copyright © The Levy Economics Institute 2007 All rights reserved. ABSTRACT While Hyman P. Minsky is best known for his work on financial instability, he was also intimately involved in the postwar debates about fiscal policy and what would become the War on Poverty. Indeed, at the University of California, Berkeley, he was a vehement critic of the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and played a major role in developing an alternative. Minsky insisted that the high investment path chosen by postwar fine-tuners would generate macroeconomic instability, and that the War on Poverty would never lower poverty rates significantly. In retrospect, he was correct on both accounts. Furthe