Discussion — Reading 2: Hyman Minsky

This session covers Reading 2: The vision of Hyman P. Minsky by Perry Mehrling.

• Minsky Study Questions

This is an intellectual biography of Hyman Minsky written by Mehrling in 1999. Minsky put the problem of liquidity front and center. Among other things, this reading emphasizes Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis and its connection to the settlement (survival) constraint: the idea that each economic actor needs to meet its cash commitments at any given time.

In the Lecture 1, Mehrling says he thinks of this article as the “missing chapters” at the end of his first book, The Money Interest and the Public Interest. In that book, he provides similar intellectual biographies for Allyn Young, Alvin Hansen, and Ed Shaw.

From the course website:

"There are five sections in this reading, and it is pretty dense reading because I was trying to fit an entire intellectual biography into the length of a journal article. For present purposes, the most important section is the third, titled "Vision", because we are trying to build some intuition about the monetary system. Second in importance is the fourth section "Minsky and the World" which shows how Minsky used his vision to engage with the concrete problems of his own time, an account that may serve as a challenge for present day students of the money view to engage the concrete problems of the present time."

Also worth checking out is a 2015 blog post by Perry Mehrling that serves as a reconsidered—and shorter—biography of Minsky that places greater emphasis on Joseph Schumpeter's influence on Minsky's thinking.

• Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis and Modern Economics

Money and Banking Summer 2023 Reddit Master Thread