John Maynard Keynes

This reissue of Hyman P. Minsky’s classic book offers a timely reconsideration of the work of economics icon John Maynard Keynes. In it, Minsky argues that what most economists consider Keynesian economics is at odds with the major points of Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Both Keynes and Minsky refuse to ignore pervasive uncertainty. Once uncertainty is given center stage, they observe, recurring financial crises are all but inescapable. For Minsky, economic calm on Main Street engenders financial system fragility that, in turn, ensures a perpetuation of boom-and-bust cycles.

As President Dimitri B. Papadimitriou and Senior Scholar L. Randall Wray write in their Introduction, this new edition of John Maynard Keynes has been published “in the hope that it will contribute to the reformation of economic theory so that it can address the world in which we actually live—the world that was always the topic of Minsky’s analysis.”

Hyman P. Minsky was an American economist who studied under Joseph Schumpeter and Wassily Leontief. He later taught economics at The University of California–Berkeley and at Washington, Brown, and Harvard Universities. In 1990, Minsky joined The Levy Economics Institute as a distinguished scholar, where he continued his research and writing until a few months before his death in October 1996.