The War on Poverty Forty Years On

The outstanding economist Hyman Minsky was always skeptical of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty. It assumed, he wrote, that economic growth itself would be adequate to eliminate poverty. But Minsky believed that there were structural problems that always left too many people without jobs or with poor and insecure ones. The answer was a national jobs program. In this article, his students, having uncovered unpublished documents by Minsky, examine the case forty years later.