Minsky and the Economics Profession

There’s an interesting (and unsettling) section of Martin Mayer’s presentation at the Minsky Conference that I’ll quote at length in which he talks about the reception of Hyman Minsky’s work.  Add this to the growing “what’s wrong with the economics profession?” folder:

I have found my own explanation, rather a disturbing one, for Hy’s relative obscurity despite the importance and intrinsic interest of his work. Several people, some of whom consider themselves followers of Hy, have noted to me that there isn’t much published work, which is nonsense: there is a lot of published work. But relatively little of it is in the economic journals. It’s in the peer-review journals.

The most important person in Minsky’s career was Bernard Shull, who has also been at a lot of these meetings, and I talked to him the other day. . . . He was a young member of the research staff at the Philadelphia Fed when he read Hy’s original article on central banks and the money market in 1957. Shull moved onto the Board of Governors to conduct a study on how the discount window actually operated and how it should operate. It was through working on that study that Hy developed the financial instability hypothesis, which was published originally in detail as a Federal Reserve document. Hy’s important work for the Ford Foundation-sponsored Commission on Money and Credit was published as part of the report of the Commission on Money and Credit. His late and long and important article on finance and profits was published by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Other major papers appeared in Festschriften and textbooks.

In the world of the economics profession, these things don’t count. Efforts to explain problems to people who might be able to do something about them are hobbies for the professor. The real work, and what he is expected to turn out, is this goddamn gelatinous stuff with its borders of mathematics that gets published in the professional journals. It may be that Hy’s increasing salience will do something about that. There was only one Hy Minsky. Natura il fece, e poi ruppe la stampa. But other lone wolves may get more attention in the future because the economics world finally awakened to the importance of Hyman Minsky, and thus the importance of publications that are not right down the standard track. We hope so.