job creation Archives

New Thinking in the News

These are the latest reflections from new thinkers around the on what should have been done already, what must be done next, and what the near future may look like:

1 | New Study Reveals Stark Picture of Bay Area Poverty Leading up to Covid-19 Pandemic, in Tipping Point Community, by john a. powell.

“Known for its progressive politics and rich diversity, the San Francisco Bay Area is no exception to patterns of systemic racial and economic inequality found across the nation,” said john a. powell, Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. “In fact, the Bay Area’s hot housing market and booming economy may exacerbate these trends, making it harder for low-skilled workers to find affordable housing and pay their bills. This study, drawing upon an original survey of Bay Area residents and census data, gives us a vivid portrait of poverty and inequality, and what we should do about it, even before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. Now this research is more urgent than ever.”

2 |30 million Americans are unemployed. Here’s how to employ them in Vox, by Pavlina Tcherneva

“But the program will actually stabilize these fluctuations. There are reasons unemployment feeds on itself. If you have this kind of preventative program, where people trickle into other employment rather than unemployment, their spending patterns are stabilized, so you have smaller fluctuations in the private sector. We see this in countries that have active labor-market policies, that do a lot more public employment than we do.”

3 | Messages from “Fiscal Space” in Project Syndicate by Jayati Ghosh

“Well before the pandemic arrived, it was evident that the financialization of the global economy was fueling massive levels of inequality and unnecessary economic volatility. In this unprecedented crisis, the need to rein it in has literally become a matter of life or death.”

4 | The ‘frugal four’ should save the European project in Social Europe by Peter Bofinger

“It is therefore crucial that the frugal four [Austria, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands] abandon their opposition to a joint financing facility at EU level. Only in this way will the European project be able to survive and Europe respond to this terrible crisis in a manner as effective as in the United States. For, as the US economist Paul Krugman has put it, paraphrasing Franklin Roosevelt, ‘The only fiscal thing to fear is deficit fear itself.’”

5 | Making the Best of a Post-Pandemic World, in Project Syndicate, by Dani Rodrik

“It is possible to envisage a more sensible, less intrusive model of economic globalization that focuses on areas where international cooperation truly pays off, including global public health, international environmental agreements, global tax havens, and other areas susceptible to beggar-thy-neighbor policies. Insofar as the world economy was already on a fragile, unsustainable path, COVID-19 clarifies the challenges we face and the decisions we must make. In each of these areas, policymakers have choices. Better and worse outcomes are possible. The fate of the world economy hinges not on what the virus does, but on how we choose to respond.”

6 | Two Rounds of Stimulus Were Supposed to Protect Jobs — Instead We Have Record Unemployment with Tom Ferguson in the Institute for Public Accuracy

“We all know that the U.S. response to COVID-19 has lagged far behind other countries. But now a real trap is closing. The public premise of the government stimulus programs was that they would be needed only for a short period and channeling aid to businesses would enable them to retain workers on their payrolls. So vast sums were handed out while the Federal Reserve intervened massively in financial markets. But now unemployment is soaring, in a country whose health insurance system is keyed to the workplace. Small businesses are collapsing and plainly never got much aid. Workers are also dropping out of the workforce in enormous numbers while a major health and safety crisis rages. Government policy has got to address these issues before it’s too late. It can’t simply grant blanket immunity to businesses for the sake of a hasty, premature reopening. A major re-calibration of policy is in order.”

Every week, we share a few noteworthy articles that showcase the work of new economic thinkers around the world. Subscribe to receive these shortlists directly to your email inbox.

For Bold Solutions We Ought To Include MMT in Economic Discourse

By Justin R. Harbour, ALM

In a recent Financial Times article, Martin Sandbu identifies three major economic failures of competitive capitalism in the West: growing inequality; the disproportionate effects of The Great Recession on young people; and the threat of displacement in labor markets brought by improving technology and the presumed ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Sandbu connects these failures to recent victories of populist “extremist” parties in the EU, UK, and US, and asserts that if liberalism and competitive capitalism are to remain a viable and persuasive platform for the next generations a bolder thinking from the Western political economy is now more necessary than ever.

This need to revamp Western capitalism has brought renewed attention to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), a school of thought that offers an important and bold perspective on economics and policy solutions. A universal basic income (UBI), universal basic services (UBS), and a job guarantee by the State are most commonly cited as a bold fix to current problems. So, it is worth asking, what are the merits of these aforementioned proposals, through the lens of MMT?

The Failures of Competitive Capitalism

To answer this question, we first look at the failures of the competitive capitalism. Growing inequality is nearly universal. According to the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD), the growth in inequality between the incomes of the top 10% of earners and the bottom 10% has not stopped since 1985:

The Great Recession accelerated this trend and brought into stark relief the confounding need of the West to rescue and protect the Recession’s primary contributors (i.e., “too big to fail” banks). This approach made the resulting trends in unemployment all the harder to take, especially for the West’s younger workers. A 2012 report on the employment effects of The Great Recession by Stanford University found that those groups hit hardest were found those 25-54 years of age (i.e., the “prime working age” range, and hence a significant variable in overall economic growth). The report also found that minority groups found themselves bearing more of the burden than their racial-majority peers. A similar report from the Federal Reserve bank of St. Louis found that the recovery rates from unemployment after The Great Recession were lowest amongst younger prime-age workers and older workers. In Europe the young have fared even worse, according to a recent report from Eurostat:

The story for wealth creation and asset acquisition for younger citizens homeownership is similarly alarming. Since World War II, homeownership has been considered to be the financial outcome indicative of a successful economy due to its positive value as a long-term asset. The decline in home ownership thus includes a worrying picture, ceteris paribus. As shown in the graph below, declining home ownership in the United States accelerated during the Recession, and remains at a rate not experienced since the economic boom of the nineties:

Though homeownership is less likely to be understood as a sign of economic success and health in Europe, research suggests a similar trend in declining home ownership in the aftermath of the Great Recession was also seen in the EU. Taken together, these trends make a generation’s economic skepticism of the ability of our current economy to deliver prosperity more of a logical first principle than not.

Three bold proposals to address this skepticism have become nearly commonplace in such reform-minded discourse: a UBI, a UBS, and a job guarantee. What does each propose, and which is best suited to address the issues identified above?

Three Bold Proposals

A UBI offers all citizens a basic level of income. UBI’s proponents commonly claim that this income is necessary for a variety of reasons. The fear of artificial intelligence taking over traditional labor tasks is commonly cited in defense of UBI. Some UBI proponents also argue that such an income would enhance human freedom by providing an option free from coercive and freedom-reducing labor arrangements. A UBI could also streamline social entitlement spending to be more efficient and less bureaucratic. A UBS does not offer income, but a variety of services deemed essential to maximize freedom and economic potential. Though the services offered differ between advocates, they often include improved and free public transportation, access to the internet, and job training, among others. A job guarantee is just as it sounds: anyone needing or wanting work but currently out of work would be offered a job by the local government to provide labor and/or services toward local projects that a community needs.

Each of these proposals includes explicit costs that must be heavily weighed. For example, the literal cost of providing a UBI substantial enough to achieve its purpose is very high. Some have suggested that its cost could range in the 30-40 trillion-dollar range in the United States. Cost-of-living variations also diminish the streamlining argument for a UBI since adjusting it for regional purchasing parity may make it even more complex bureaucratically than the current system. Explicit costs also represent an issue for UBS, though ostensibly less so than a UBI. Though the job guarantee does face some cost concerns, important work has recently demonstrated that the opportunity costs of such a program are well worth the explicit costs it may incur.

Though each proposal is bold in its promises and its trade-offs, the more important question here is which offers a better redress of the concerns raised by the Great Recession. It appears that the job guarantee is the better situated to address all those concerns on both explicit and implicit cost fronts. The job guarantee addresses the unemployment problem and wages problem directly. The job guarantee has the additional appeal of making it more likely that the newly employed will accumulate enough wealth to make home ownership an attractive option, and thus satisfy the third concern. Conversely, a UBI only deals with the wage issue directly and therefore the unemployment problem indirectly, while a UBS program does not address any of the problems directly. There are several other variables at play that strengthen the argument for job guarantee over the others. Most importantly, the job guarantee is the only one that signals the value of work – an implication necessary for future growth if an economy hopes to move beyond its current frontier. In doing so, it is more likely to find traction in our polarized political paradigm by avoiding the typical debates associated with strengthening social safety nets.

The Rise of Modern Monetary Theory

The economic school most strongly advocating for the affordability of a job guarantee program – Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – has been experiencing a surge of public interest and acceptance as of late. This is not to say it is brand new or has not been trying to advocate for the policies its theory substantiates for a long time. But its appeal since the experience of the Great Recession is obvious once one digs into it. MMT is a theory of sovereign monetary policy that asserts that sovereign nations that issue debt in its own fiat currency cannot ever run out of money. Any restraint by a nation on their spending for any reason, including to stimulate demand or provide needed relief is, therefore, a purely political decision, and only restrained by the availability of real resources. MMT’s advocates thus model how under MMT’s reorientation of fiscal perspective, a nation’s fiscal and monetary policy options are much broader than under older and perhaps more dominant paradigms. The implication is that there are bolder and further reaching policy options always available to state to provide relief for distressed citizens during downturns if they can move beyond the unnecessary concerns for debt and deficits during such times.

The most notable of MMT’s more active contemporary economists include L. Randall Wray, Warren Mosler, and Stephanie Kelton. There are several websites dedicated to the defense of its theory by these authors and others: one by another of its theorists Bill Mitchell; and The Minskys, so named to honor one of the more prominent economists to set the foundations of MMT, Hyman Minsky. Of additional note would be Ms. Kelton’s work with the campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and her recent inclusion into Bloomberg View’s stable of writers – an inclusion suggesting that MMT’s theories are gaining traction. There have also been recent news items such as a history of MMT in Vice News and a review of its contemporary appeal in The Nation. Finally, there has been the consistent work and advocacy of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. MMT, in other words, appears here to stay.

Important work has been produced recently by MMT economists as well. In the United States, the Levy Institute recently published a report on the macroeconomic effects of canceling all student debt. The report finds that effects of such a policy would have a greater economic stimulus on employment and GDP than its costs can reasonably argue against. So too did the Levy Institute publish a report on the feasibility of the guaranteed job program discussed above. The job guarantee has helpfully garnered bipartisan support from the political right, left, and center.

Though popular within certain corners of the public sphere and gaining traction, it is not without its legitimate faults and challenges. Nonetheless, an undergraduate or higher level secondary student is unlikely to be exposed to MMT during their introductory training. I am not here suggesting that the more traditional curriculum is not appropriate for introductory students, nor universally ambivalent about the inclusion of emerging theories. But I am saying that for some teachers and some curriculums, finding ways to include such exciting emerging work with profound implications on their economic thinking and potentially their communities are harder the more they are not engaged with by “mainstream” outlets. What’s more, some of the more ubiquitous and far-reaching introductory curriculums (Advanced Placement in America, for example, or the International Baccalaureate program) don’t consider it at all.

At a time when some are rightfully calling for economists to better communicate economic concepts, ignoring newer and bolder conceptions of economic pillars that have popular momentum and real-world applicability behind them – such as MMT – leaves a fruitful learning opportunity to advance economic thinking and communicating skills for the youngest of economists at the door. Mr. Sandbu is right; the experience of the Great Recession by Gen Xers, Millennials, and those closely on their heels demands bold reform to reanimate the economy’s perceived legitimacy. A generation of economists and their work will be informed by their experience with the Great Recession. Let us all hope that MMT and its similar promising competitors are taken as seriously as the older theories so that we can rethink and rebuild economics in a way that makes economic thinking and understanding economic theory a universal pillar to our civic discourse.

About the author

Justin Harbour is currently an Instructor for Advanced Placement Economics at La Salle College High School in Philadelphia, PA. Having studied history, government, and political economy at UMASS, Amherst and Harvard University, he has previously published book reviews on teaching and education for the Teacher’s College Record and essays in CLIO: Newsletter of Politics and History, The World History Bulletin, and Political Animal. Justin lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children. Follow him on twitter @jrharbour1

It’s Time to Guarantee Jobs

The first half of the twentieth century was a challenging time for economics. The Great Depression wiped out incomes, investments, and most importantly, optimism. But when the traditional laissez-faire approach proved ineffective, the work of Keynes and FDR showed that there was another way. The New Deal employed American workers directly and restored confidence among business owners. Today, we could benefit from a similar program. It’s time for a new New Deal, or a Job Guarantee Program, that secures employment to all who are able and willing to work. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. By Johnny Fulfer.

What We Learned from the Great Depression

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. economy was in a recession just over 48 percent of the time between 1871 and 1900. But none were as bad as the crisis that followed The Great Crash of 1929. Nevertheless, orthodox economic theorists urged policymakers to maintain the status quo and argued the economy would return to normal as long as it was left alone. This perspective was influential and often framed the ways in which political leaders such as Herbert Hoover understood the crisis. Hoover was not only politically committed to free-market ideas, he was psychologically invested in them, urging Americans to show thrift and self-reliance, practices which later resulted in more turmoil.

Elected president in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt did not have an all-embracing theory that would solve all America’s problems. Rather, he employed a wide range of policies, some of which failed, while others were successful in getting people to work. Perhaps the greatest impact Roosevelt’s New Deal had on American society was the change in perspective policymakers had toward government intervention. Earlier leaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had had only moderate success producing government initiatives to restrain the predatory nature of American capitalism. But after the Great Depression, FDR helped policymakers and citizens markedly change their views in favor of government assistance, temporarily pushing the conservative opposition to the margins.

As such, FDR’s New Deal momentarily ended the ‘rugged individualism’ of the Hoover era and demonstrated that free-market economics could not be relied upon in a time of crisis. When the economy falls into a slump, the government must be used as a source of relief.

This, too, is the argument that John Maynard Keynes makes in his influential 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes challenged the neoclassical principle that the market naturally adjusts itself to full employment. Along with the two held theories of unemployment—voluntary and frictional—Keynes wrote, there is also the involuntary, which was the result of a shortfall in aggregate demand.

The volatility of investment, Keynes argued, is dependent on our expectations of the future. The only way entrepreneurs would invest is if they expect sufficient demand for goods and services. This was a problem during the Depression—spending money was scarce. When people are unemployed, or fearful of losing their jobs, they are likely to reduce spending. This creates a cycle of insufficient demand, bringing profit-expectations down. Increasing savings, Keynes showed, would only make things worse. A rise in savings would reduce spending, and thus bring down the total level of employment and income. Surplus inventories with nobody to buy commercial products would force firms to contract operations and lay off even more workers.

Therefore, Keynes concluded, there is no automatic recovery from depression; supply does not create its own demand. The only solution is for the government to heavily invest in public works, creating jobs and increasing demand to rebuild confidence in the business community.

Roosevelt’s New Deal did exactly this. It produced nearly 13 million jobs, over 60 percent of which came from the Works Progress Administration, an organization which hired a wide range of individuals, from artists and writers to laborers who constructed roads, bridges, and schools. An incredible number of public goods were provided through these programs, and money was placed in the hands of the workers, whose purchasing power gave business owners’ profit expectations the much needed boost.

Why We Need a new New Deal

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently published a report examining the current employment conditions in the United States. The unemployment rate stands at 4.1 percent, the BLS reports, which is roughly 6.6 million people in the labor force. While the unemployment rate is relatively low from a conventional perspective, Dantas and Wray argue that this does not consider the falling participation rate for prime-age workers and wide-spread income stagnation.

Moreover, we often gauge the economy based on the unemployment rate, although, this economic indicator does not consider the fact that 40.6 million Americans remain in poverty. A job paying the current federal minimum wage doesn’t mean a worker will make enough money to live without relying on various forms of welfare. In order to turn this around, we need a new New Deal.

While the New Deal of the 1930s was a centralized program, controlled by the federal government, Dantas and Wray propose that a “new New Deal” would be more efficient by creating a more decentralized workforce, hired by state and local governments to meet the needs of the local communities, with wages paid by the federal government. They propose a Job Guarantee program.

The idea behind this policy is that those who are involuntarily unemployed don’t have to be if the government supplied them with a job. Economist Carlos Maciel further argues that the Job Guarantee program would cost around 1 percent of the U.S. GDP, providing additional jobs through the multiplier effect. When the government invests $1, it multiplies through consumer spending, turning into $2 or $3 in the real economy. In his General Theory, Keynes estimated the multiplier to be somewhere between 2 ½ and 3.

Employment works in the same manner. If one new job is created from the initial government investment, the consumption created by the additional worker will produce more jobs in other industries, whose consumption will take the process further, until the multiplier is reached. Moreover, this program would redistribute money from current welfare programs toward the Job Guarantee program. Those who are currently under the poverty line will not need traditional welfare benefits if they have jobs that pay a living wage.

Perhaps the reason U.S. policymakers are hesitant towards a Job Guarantee program has less to do with economics, and more about an investment in the status quo, whether politically or psychologically. Many Americans are invested in the idea of ‘free markets’, whatever they envision that to be, pushing rational economic discourse and the notion of social justice to the margins, and elevating the politically constructed parallel between self-interest and the partial idea of the American Dream. We must move beyond the free-market ideology, which views everything as profit or loss, win or lose. Only time will tell how this polarized form of reasoning will impact the American people, especially the 40.6 million Americans that are currently below the poverty line, who stand to suffer the most.

About the Author: Johnny Fulfer received a B.S. in Economics and a B.S. in History from Eastern Oregon University. He is currently pursuing an M.A. in History at the University of South Florida and has an interest in political economy, the history of economic thought, intellectual and cultural history, and the history of the human sciences and their relation to the power in society.

The Basic Income and Job Guarantees are Complementary, not Opposing Policies.

It’s disappointing to see debates between proponents of the Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) and the Job Guarantee (JG). These discussions detract from the fact that both of these ideal policies are distant from the policies we currently have in place. Supporters of either of these policies should be working together to get either one implemented, and we can debate adding the other later. Today, we need to move beyond our current disjointed welfare system to one that will help Americans, and either policy (or both!) seems like a step in the right direction.

If we look at the current system, the three largest welfare programs we have are Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Before the Affordable Care Act (ACA), Medicaid was limited to certain low-income individuals, but the ACA expanded this program so that all adults with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line are eligible. For FY 2015 Medicaid cost $532 billion to cover 73 million individuals. EITC provides additional income to low wage workers, and in 2014 paid out $67 billion to 27.5 million tax filers. Finally, SNAP guarantees an income to buy certain necessary items, and paid out $69 billion to 22 million households in 2015.

Then beyond those three largest programs, we have a smattering of additional programs that help the poor in this country. There’s a housing assistance program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for the elderly, Pell Grants for college tuition, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families(TANF) program, the Child Nutrition Program, the Head Start preschool program, various Job Training programs (like AmeriCorps and Job Corps) under the Workforce Investment Act, Unemployment Insurance, the Child Tax Credit, Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants, and Children(WIC), and then theres others I’m sure I missed (oh yeah, the Obama phone!) along with various state and local programs. The amount of overlap, overhead, and bureaucracy involved with running all of these programs surely diminishes their effectiveness.

All of these programs provide support by doling out income or necessities, with or without a requirement that the recipient be working. BIG and JG would both be ways to consolidate all of these programs, and then the debate becomes how much does someone have to work in order to receive assistance. A lot of people who advocate for BIG think that our current system has a lot of pointless jobs, and BIG would be away to allow those people to pursue something more creative. Considering that most entrepreneurs have one thing in common — access to capital — that may not be too far off. Then there are JG proponents who probably agree with that point, but think we can use the policy to help organize jobs that need to be done (liking cleaning up our environment, or building our infrastructure). Most people who support BIG worry that a JG would create “make-work”, quoting Keynes famous “bury bank notes and dig them back up” line. To them, just giving people the bank notes makes more sense. On the other hand, JG proponents worry about losing the social utility of work. People want to contribute to society, and they see work that needs to be done. Both policies seem hard to pass in todays political climate.

I think proponents of both the BIG and JG are disappointed with a U6 unemployment rate of 9.5%, current companies lack of interest in maintaining our environment, and over 45 million Americans living in poverty. Call it whatever you want, let’s guarantee every American access to the necessities: healthy food, shelter, and healthcare. Clearly this is going to require some people to do some work, so let’s make sure that work gets done with our social structure as well. Calling it a BIG or a Basic Necessities Guarantee (BNG) or a JG doesn’t matter so much to me.

In fact, I’d probably start with calling it the EITC. Get rid of the minimum income phase in, and we instantly have a “BIG”, with all the infrastructure already in place. It would only go to unemployed or low income citizens, since the EITC phases out, which helps it be a progressive policy. So that it can cover the housing benefits and others, we could expand the credit a bit too. How do we pay for this? It’s simple. Scrap the other welfare programs (keep Medicaid, that one’s complicated). The overhead of having all of these programs is gross. How feasible is this plan? Honestly, no clue. I’ve never made a policy. I’ve barely met anyone who even makes policy. It seems like the closest option there is, however. I can see the complaints already though. These ungrateful welfare abusers will buy alcohol and drugs with their new found income! Somehow it’s not OK to drink and do drugs if you’re poor, but if you’re rich, go for it, right? If you get rid of SNAP, people won’t buy food for themselves! Well surprise, there’s already a way to trade SNAP benefits for cash — it’s called craigslist.

Then there’s the other major complaint this would cause — now there is no incentive to work. We have to keep abject poverty as a social option so that people keep working at McDonalds making the McObese, and keep stocking the Wal-Mart shelves so that Wal-Mart can pay starvation wages which allow people to be eligible for the EITC in the first place. I’m not really sure those are the jobs that need to be done. If our low wage workers were working on local farms producing fruits and vegetables, I’d probably agree… someone has to do those things (or make robots to do them!). Yet I haven’t seen any proof an income stops people from working. It’s all speculation. I bet people still do things. Here I am, incomeless, and I’m doing something. I’m writing. I’m volunteering. I’m applying to jobs that I want to do and think will have a positive benefit. Getting rejected, but still, I’m trying.

Let’s see what happens when everyone has some cash on hand. If we start starving and need the government to force us to produce food, we’ll do it then. Yet from the friends I’ve talked to, boredom is a very potent driver of change. I know my fellow millennials and I have dreams of growing our own food in our parents backyards, or the empty lot across the street, or the empty K-Mart, or the empty mall. If only they’d let us. If only we had a little income, a little land, and some water to give it a try. If only the police weren’t killing and hurting us. If only Nestle wasn’t pumping out water from government land for free and forcing us to spend money on it. A lot of us worked our asses off at school, and what did we get? The choice between huge corporations who we see as destroying the environment, or low incomes working retail living with our family and friends. Meh. My friends and I want something different. I choose believing there’s something better than choosing between two evils.

Remember when the public hated huge corporations for destroying small business, not each others’ identities? Do we remember The High Cost of Low Price? BIG and JG proponents, let’s not quibble. We’re on the same side. There’s work to be done. Get organized. Make it happen.

Originally published on Medium

In the Spotlight: Pavlina Tcherneva

If I ask you to picture an economist, chances are you’ll visualize an older white male who makes you feel bad for failing to understand mysterious diagrams. Those certainly exist. But so does Pavlina Tcherneva. Chair and Associate Professor of the Economics Department at Bard College, Pavlina spearheads the group of faculty that convinced me (daughter of graphic-designer-dad and dancer-mom) to get a degree in Economics, and then another.

Pavlina’s Work in a Nutshell
Pavlina is comfortable in many unconventional territories of economics. She can tell you why the government should be your backup employer, why the federal budget really need not balance, and what money really is. Besides the US and her native Bulgaria, she’s consulted policy makers in Argentina, China, Canada, and the UK. Her work has been recognized by a wide range of people; most recently by Bernie Sanders, who used her graph to illustrate his point on inequality.

Current Research
Pavlina’s current research focuses on the “Job Guarantee” policy, which recommends the government acts like an employer of last resort by directly employing those people looking for work during economic slowdowns. In 2006, she spent her summer in the libraries of Cambridge, examining the original writings of Keynes. She offered a fresh interpretation of his approach to fiscal policy, and got a prize for it, too. Today, she investigates what the policy can do for economic growth, the unemployed, and in particular: women and youth.

Path to the Present
If you’re feeling inspired, take note: Being like Pavlina doesn’t happen overnight. In her case, it began with winning a competition that sent her to the US as an exchange student. She then earned a BA in math and economics from Gettysburg College, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her undergraduate honors thesis was a math model of how a monopoly currency issuer can use its price setting powers to produce long-run full employment with stable prices.

As a college student, she helped organize a conference in Bretton Woods around this idea, which became the inaugural event of what has become known as Modern Monetary Theory. Then, there were a few years of teaching at UMKC and Franklin and Marshall, and a subsequent move to the Levy Economics Institute and Bard College several years ago. In the midst of all that, she was a two-time grantee from the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) in New York. Today, Pavlina lives in the Hudson Valley, together with her husband and daughter.

Eager for more?
If you’re curious about the Job Guarantee policy, here is both a 15 minute video, and a 150 page book. To understand Pavlina’s take on the Federal Budget, this article goes a long way. And to figure out what’s the deal with money, read this chapter of her book. Her work on inequality was featured in the New York Times, NPR, and other major media outlets. She has articles published by INET, Huffington Post, and over a dozen works on the SSRN.

The Job Guarantee: The Coolest Economic Policy You’ve Never Heard Of

When you think of economic issues what are the first things that come to mind? Poverty, inequality, unemployment, inflation, and crisis are all common answers to the question. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a policy that could address all of those issues (and more) in a cost-effective manner? In this piece I will give a very brief introduction to Job Guarantee (JG) schemes, the proverbial economic silver bullet.

Hyperboles aside, Job Guarantee proposals (which may come in many different names such as Employer of Last Resort, or Public Service Employment) are a remarkably good way to address many of the social economic problems current faced by populations all over the world. Ideas about JG programs date back to as early as the 1600s, they have been implemented in many nations during a variety of different stages of the business cycle – and usually to a great deal of success.

Simply put, JG is a direct public employment policy where all of those people who are willing and able to work are guaranteed a job given that these individuals meet some basic employability requirements. Most proponents of JG establish that these jobs should pay a basic, fixed, uniform wage plus full medical coverage and free child care (the latter can be provided by JG workers themselves). The goal of the program should be to ensure that all full-time JG workers are able to obtain a living standard that is above a reasonable poverty threshold. Thus, this sort of program go a long way in addressing poverty. Furthermore, it would also target another major economic problem, the stagnation of real wages and the currently low minimum wage granted to US workers. The JG wage would instantly become the minimum wage for the entire economy: workers in other sectors that are receiving less than the JG wage would be very compelled to take one of those guaranteed jobs, and employers would have to raise their salary offers in order to keep their workforce. Finally, the wages would also act as price anchor, which improves upon the stability of the economy.

The first question I usually get when telling someone about the Job Guarantee is “yeah but, how can we afford it?!” Questions about the deficit and national debt have been put to rest previously on this blog (see here), hence I shall focus on other questions regarding its affordability. For starters, it has been shown elsewhere that JG is remarkably cheaper and more effective than other proposals, such as Basic Income and Negative Income Tax, in achieving lower poverty and unemployment rates (see here, and in many pieces by Rutger’s Phillip Harvey). Secondly, the newly employed JG workers would bring in savings in many different ways: they would get out of unemployment insurance, food-stamps, and other such programs; they will pay income tax, medicare and social security tax, as well as more consumption related taxes; and the government would spend less on issues that are related to poverty, such as higher crime rates. In addition, employment multipliers would make it so the JG program would not have to employ the entire unemployed population. The extra consumption and production related to the JG will create indirect and induced jobs which will represent a significant portion of the job creation from the program. Finally, yours truly is among a number of economists who have modeled the implementation of a a JG for the US and found that eliminating unemployment at a living wage would cost just around 1% of the American GDP.

At this point many say something like “but employing everyone while raising the minimum wage has to be inflationary!” the answer to which is a simple “nope”. First, we have to bear in mind that in the current system the economy’s most precious resource – workers – is being wasted in unemployment, while under a JG program it will be put to use. Orthodox economic thought claims that millions of people need to be unemployed in order to contain inflation, that it is financially “sound” to a tenth of the population in idleness for an unknown period of time. It comes from the idea that the economy is always operating at full capacity, which then brings the inflation problem to being a matter of equilibrating the demand and supply forces of the economy. Both of these assertions are, to quote Keynes, “crazily improbable – the sort of thing that which no man could believe had not his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years.” Government expenditure is as inflationary as any other sector expenditure. Unemployed workers are spending in consumption either way, being sustained by welfare or, dangerously, by credit – and there’s nothing financially “sound” about that.

A JG program would in fact control for inflation by proving a minimum wage anchor for prices and by increasing the productive capacity of the economy through its projects. It would take off the pressure put on demand from the unemployed by increasing supply of goods and services by incorporating those idle workers in the productive structure. Furthermore, even if we assume it to be inflationary it would be a “one-time” increase in inflation, and not an accelerating type one, meaning that demand (and inflation) wouldn’t rise above the full employment level.

In that sense, the costs associated with a JG program (increasing budget deficit and inflation) are not more than ideological myths that obscure the true social costs of unemployment and poverty and curtails any innovative attempts to deal with them. Indeed, generating aggregate demand, employment and inflation is all what the US economy has tried to do since the 2008 financial crisis, but through the wrong ways. A JG program would be extremely more efficient and less costly than QE or negative interest rates. As the world crumbles in economic and political instability, guaranteeing jobs would surely deal with most of its problems. It is up to governments to load and shoot that silver bullet. I don’t think there’s a more appropriate time than now.

Written by Carlos Maciel & Vitor Mello
Illustrations by Heske van Doornen