CONCEPT
Employer of Last Resort
Minsky's proposed federal employment guarantee — a permanent stabilizer that absorbs displaced workers, maintains aggregate demand, and places a floor beneath private-sector wages without competing with private employment.
The employer of last resort (ELR) program is Hyman Minsky's specific policy proposal for addressing the structural problem that monetary policy cannot solve: the unemployment that persists when private firms will not hire at wages that workers can accept. The program, developed across Minsky's later career and refined by post-Keynesian economists including Pavlina Tcherneva, provides a federal guarantee of employment at a base wage for anyone willing to work, performing socially useful tasks that the private market does not adequately supply. The program operates as a permanent stabilizer: it absorbs workers during downturns, releases them to private employers during booms, maintains aggregate demand through all phases of the cycle, and establishes a floor beneath which private-sector wages cannot fall. The Opus 4.6 simulation identifies the program as a specific candidate for the institutional dam the AI economy needs but has not built.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The ELR concept responds to a specific failure of monetary policy: the central