A Tribute to Hyman P. Minsky
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