by Summary:
Hyman Minsky inspired many leftist economists, like Steve Keen and Micheal Hudson, but on the benefit system it seems he was very right wing. Matt Bruenig gives Minsky's views a good hearing, but at the end he says that the benefit system has been a success at ending much of the poverty in the US.I like the idea of lowering the retirement age to create more jobs and keeping youngsters in school longer to learn more skills. Alas, the trend has been to increase the retirement age. KV Economist Hyman Minsky is often cited as the forerunner of the job guarantee movement. In order to get a better understanding of its origins, I decided to read a collection of his writings on the subject that was published by the Levy Institute in 2013. The title of the collection is “Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not
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Hyman Minsky inspired many leftist economists, like Steve Keen and Micheal Hudson, but on the benefit system it seems he was very right wing. Matt Bruenig gives Minsky's views a good hearing, but at the end he says that the benefit system has been a success at ending much of the poverty in the US.Hyman Minsky inspired many leftist economists, like Steve Keen and Micheal Hudson, but on the benefit system it seems he was very right wing. Matt Bruenig gives Minsky's views a good hearing, but at the end he says that the benefit system has been a success at ending much of the poverty in the US.I like the idea of lowering the retirement age to create more jobs and keeping youngsters in school longer to learn more skills. Alas, the trend has been to increase the retirement age. KV Economist Hyman Minsky is often cited as the forerunner of the job guarantee movement. In order to get a better understanding of its origins, I decided to read a collection of his writings on the subject that was published by the Levy Institute in 2013. The title of the collection is “Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not
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I like the idea of lowering the retirement age to create more jobs and keeping youngsters in school longer to learn more skills. Alas, the trend has been to increase the retirement age. KV
Economist Hyman Minsky is often cited as the forerunner of the job guarantee movement. In order to get a better understanding of its origins, I decided to read a collection of his writings on the subject that was published by the Levy Institute in 2013. The title of the collection is “Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare” and unfortunately kind of tells you where Minsky is coming from on this stuff.
Minsky’s writing reveals a deep antipathy towards the War on Poverty, transfer payments, and the welfare state more generally. In his 1975 work “The Poverty of Economic Policy,” he writes that “a most striking aspect of the irrelevance and wrongheadedness of policy has been the recourse to the dole, not only in response to the current recession, but over the long run.” To clarify, he explained further that “a dole is the handing out of cash or services where nothing is required in exchange for the handout.”
Minsky goes on to describe welfare state measures as “the anti-employment thrust to policy,” a phrase that he uses to describe both benefit programs for able-bodied adults like AFDC, unemployment insurance, and food stamps and shifts to keep kids in school longer and lower the retirement age.
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It’s clear that Minsky viewed the job guarantee as a welfare state replacement program, at least in significant part. His views on welfare would today be classified as quite right-wing and are also just empirically wrong. The Columbia measure — a poverty metric based on the Supplemental Poverty Measure that includes transfer payments in its income definition — shows that poverty declined from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012, a fall of nearly 40 percent. Over the same period, poverty measured by market income did not fall at all and indeed ticked up slightly, meaning that the welfare state is solely responsible for the significant decline in poverty over the period.