WORK
John Maynard Keynes (Minsky)
Minsky's 1975 monograph — his interpretation of Keynes's
General Theory that recovered the
financial instability argument the neoclassical synthesis had suppressed.
John Maynard Keynes (Columbia University Press, 1975) is
Hyman Minsky's book-length reinterpretation of Keynes's
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). The book argues that the neoclassical synthesis — the postwar integration of Keynes's framework with the pre-Keynesian equilibrium economics Keynes had attempted to supersede — had systematically misread Keynes by excluding the chapters on uncertainty, financial structure, and investment that Minsky considered central to Keynes's argument. Minsky's Keynes is not the Keynes of IS-LM diagrams and short-run stabilization policy. Minsky's Keynes is the analyst of capitalist instability, the theorist of chapter 12 on the state of long-term expectation, the economist who understood that investment decisions under uncertainty produce cycles that monetary policy alone cannot moderate. The book provided the theoretical foundation for Minsky's subsequent work on financial instability.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book responds to a specific intellectual failure that Minsky identified in postwar macroeconomics. Keynes's General Theory contained multiple analytical threads; the postwar profession systematically emphasized the threads compatible with equilibrium analysis