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...

This economist thinks that private debt got too far out of hand in the 1990s to make a recovery and economic expansion easy to achieve. He wants the federal government, among other things, to bail out the states and perhaps loosen its fiscal posture well beyond the short run.