more about paul douglas from: "New Perspectives in Monetary Macroeconomics -Explorations in the Tradition of Hyman P. Minsky", by Gary Dumski and R. Pollin (eds.), p. 354:
"An incidental meeting with Lange on "a windswept elevated train platform" proved to be crucial to Minsky's career; coincidence and uncertainty were to remain crucial also in his economic theories. Lange apparently suggested that he should look into majoring in economics instead of mathematics and physics, which Minsky found unsatisfying. Lange was also instrumental in introducing Minsky to Abba Lerner, who became a life-long friend. This meeting took place in a political/social gathering organized by the Socialist Club at Professor Paul Douglas's apartment.[Note] Forty-six years later Minsky remembered this evening: "Lange introduced me to a friend of his, a British visitor who seemed equally ill at case. As a result, I spent most of the evening talking to Abba Lemer who had just come from Mexico, where he had apparently tried to convince Trotsky that Marxism needed to be revised in the light of the new insights due to Keynes." Trotsky, who was murdered a year later, did not revise Marxism in this light, but Lange and Lerner were struggling to redefine socialist thinking, trying to build a bridge between Marxian analysis and modern economic theory. Both rejected mainstream interpretations of Marx, including the then sacred labor theory of value and the Soviet-style command economy. But they also held to some of the basic Marxian messages, including class analysis and the dismal future of capitalism. Where did Minsky stand on these issues in later years? I will try to shed some new light on Minsky's relationship to Marx through examination of the two thinkers' views on several issues. First 1 will discuss their views on crises in a capitalist system, examining whether they thought this phenomenon to be unavoidable and, if not, what means they believed could prevent such waste. Considering this issue will then lead me to compare their positions on the government's role in a capitalist economy. A second, and related, topic will be their analyses of money and finance in developed capitalism. Here we will turn to their own arguments as well as their place in the history of monetary theory. I will argue that, concerning this heatedly debated topic, Marx and Minsky share some roots. They both held many of the conclusions of the anti-quantity theory of money tendency as Note: Paul Douglas is known for the famous Cobb-Douglas production function. However, when Douglas was a professor, Minsky remarks, "[he] was not an ordinary neoclassical theorist," and in "his various courses he often enthused about the Utopian visions of Robert Owen and he took bargaining theories of wage determination - such as the Webbs put forth - seriously," (Minsky 1985, p. 216). Douglas later became a liberal senator from Illinois. Manel
