So I’m actually reading Hyman Minsky’s magnum opus, here in Seoul. (Yay Amazon Kindle; boo its habit of crashing every hour or so, and having to be reset. Are other people having that problem?) And I have to say that the Platonic ideal of Minsky is a lot better than the reality.
There’s a deep insight in there; both the concept of financial fragility and his insight, way ahead of anyone else, that as the memory of the Depression faded the system was in fact becoming more fragile. But that insight takes up part of Chapter 9. The rest is a long slog through turgid writing, Kaleckian income distribution theory (which I don’t think has anything to do with the fundamental point), and more.
To be fair, it took me several decades before I learned to appreciate Keynes in the original. Maybe a reread will make me see the depths of Minsky’s insight across the board. Or maybe not.
I guess the point is that you can be a bad writer and a great economist. And I really am gravitating toward a Keynes-Fisher-Minsky view of macro, although of the three I’d much rather read Keynes.
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