American Public Policy and Full Employment: The Imperative of Martin Luther King’s Political Economy in the 21st Century

Abstract

Martin Luther King gave no small deliberation to questions of economic policy. Policy and political economy debates have come full circle the past 50 years, returning precisely to the ideas King envisioned as necessary for creating a just and well-performing economy. Following King’s death, the “neoclassical consensus” reversed much of the economic thought of the classical economists (including 19th-century heterodox thinkers, such as the German Historical School, for example, Friedrich List; and the American School, for example, Simon Patten), Keynesians, and public intellectuals like King. Today, however, some economists such as Paul Krugman have signaled that important intellectual contributions have emerged from nonspecialists, who nonetheless possess great insight into economic thought. This article argues that King, while a nonspecialist, displayed great insights into the working of economies in ways possessing resonance for contemporary economic and public policy debates on employment, inequality, and even tempering political extremism of the type that marred the international order in the 1930s and of which we are seeing hints of today.