I strongly support the notion of a job guarantee. I am very heartened by your post to see that this concept exists in Economics. I have always found the notion intuitively obvious—so obvious in fact that I thought perhaps it was either taken for granted or rejected by a consensus of economists. (I come from a Computer Science and mathematics background primarily, with additional study in the natural sciences, philosophy, and psychology.) How could an entire field of study, Economics, miss something so obvious and so socially crucial right in its wheelhouse?
To your comments above, I don't think we really disagree very much. I agree that any solution needs to be simple and difficult to game. But in creating a job guarantee system, we need to make sure we don't make it "too simple." There are many reasons the government should support business revenue streams during downturns, imo. I will mention two.
First, employees gain tremendously if their employers don't lay them off at all. Their careers are preserved, not to mention their social ties and lifestyles. Further, if the government preserves an employing business, that business survives as a labor consumer for current and future employees. Simply hiring the unemployed after they have been laid off should be there as a last resort, of course, but keeping people in their jobs is almost certainly more efficient and far less destructive to their real and intangible wealth.
Second, of course, a company or corporation is a wealth repository that is far greater than the sum of its parts. The rescue of GM and Chrysler, for example, preserved not only employment, but tasks, know-how, teams, etc. Moreover, in the long run, the rescues preserved their surrounding communities. Even if there had been the political will to simply hire the workers who would have been displaced (no chance, thanks to the Republicans), there would be progressively less and less will over time. By preserving companies through transient downturns, we preserve an ingrained status quo. That is much easier than trying to preserve political will.
There are always going to be those who will game the system and try to cheat it. That is a great argument for regulations and one of the better arguments for prisons. Every system is replete with hazards, moral and otherwise. One of the reasons I am a Democrat is that our side does a far better job at recognizing those hazards.
I liked your link to the MMT blog entry. I was glad to see that job guarantee seems to have some respectability if not the dominance it deserves. I wonder what MMT has to say about the meaning of wealth, bubbles, and savings. Thanks for your posts!
|
