Sunday, January 5, 2014

Randy Wray — Push for Job Guarantee Gains Momentum

I just returned from the big annual meeting of economists (this time in Philly), at which we had a panel on the Job Guarantee. One of the papers on our panel was by William (Sandy) Darity and Darrick Hamilton, which demonstrated how imperative it is to implement the JG to reduce hiring discrimination in the labor market. Darrick (who presented the paper) pointed out that official unemployment rates for black Americans is chronically twice as high as that for whites; by conventional views of what constitutes Great Depression levels of unemployment, black Americans are in a Great Depression and are always suffering from at least recession levels of unemployment…
Here are three recent, interesting, pieces on the JG proposal, two by Sandy Darity and one by Jesse Myerson at Rolling Stone.
Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Push for Job Guarantee Gains Momentum
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, University of Missouri at Kansas City

13 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow! I'm amazed at how stubbornly Wray and Co. insist on make-work!

Hey Randal, people can find their own meaningful (by definition) work to do if they have the resources - resources that in many cases were stolen from them via the banking cartel.

The spirit of tyranny lives on, I see, in God-for-saking Progressives who prefer to be God themselves, it seems.

Malmo's Ghost said...

Wray's the economic equivalent of a devout Calvinist zealot.

Calgacus said...

No, Wray is just making simple logical, irrefutable arguments - IMHO not strongly enough. But in a discipline, economics, where all are accustomed to sloppy, often magical thinking of all types from every side.

F Beard: The government is made of people, as is the society as a whole, as are the unemployed. That's what the JG is - "people finding meaningful (by definition) work to do" - and being recognized for it.

Abstractly suggesting this will happen - by magic? - but opposing people making it a reality is thus opposition to "people find[ing] their own meaningful work to do". The tyranny is the monetary economy without a JG.

Ryan Harris said...

I'm wonder how well attended the AEA panel presenting Darity and Hamilton's work was.

Mosler posted an interview with John Cochrane where he is sort of obsessed with the fiscal theory of price levels so maybe there is some hope that these sort of formerly radical ideas might make it into mainstream literature acceptable to Demo-Repubs. I guess we'll have to see how/what sort of Neo-Democrat/Libertarian spin they can put on a fiscal view of inflation to really bastardize and inflict the most human suffering possible before we can decide. Surely CATO won't advocate a JG. NEVER. EVER. IN A MILLION YEARS. I've been racking my brain for days trying to figure out what sadistic but novel idea he is hatching given the hints in his interview.

Anonymous said...

Most people who do not have jobs want jobs. They want to make and honest living. They want to contribute to their society in exchange for a fair share of the goods that the society is able to produce. Capitalism has proven over and over that it is incapable of spontaneously generating all of the work opportunities needed for everyone to earn a living in that way. As a result, a society that relies too much on the capitalist mode of economic organization will end up with a class of miserable and deprived jobless. Both the unemployed and society as a whole lose out from the chronic joblessness.

This has nothing to do with the monetary system. It is inherent in any system that is organized too much on the principles of private capital accumulation, private enterprise and private exchange. Some think, "Well if there are all those unemployed people, that must be because we have run out of worthwhile things to do!" But anyone who looks around our world with our landscape of collapsing civilization, rotted-out housing and municipal infrastructures, trailer parks, drug dens, prisons as far as the eye can see and last-century energy systems, and could think such thoughts about being out of useful jobs to do, has had their brain thoroughly rotted by capitalist propaganda.

Tom Hickey said...

Dan is correct. Modern capitalism cannot employ everyone profitably nor can it deliver vital goods and services universally in a profitable way either, at least wrt to the optimal return on investment. So the question becomes how government can best address the issue.

existing institutional arrangements of modern capitalism or in another system.

If within, by a JG, a BIG, the dole, etc? Which is preferable and one what criteria?

If in another system, what system would be optimal and on what criteria? And what would that system look like, what changes would need to be made and how would we get there from here?

Matt Franko said...

Hey F.,

" 'Why stand you here the whole day idle?'
7 They are saying to him that 'No one hires us.' " Mat 20:6-7

Try to stop being a "disciple" and just simply read what the heck it says...

People are out of work because no one hires them... period.

If we want to increase employment then people have to be hired...

I dont think this can be made simpler or more true.

rsp,

Ryan Harris said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Matt Franko said...

F.,

Don't go out and and buy an asbestos suit...

Calgacus said...

Modern day slave drivers like Wray should remember that self-employment was the norm before the Enclosure Acts and government-backed banks robbed people of their means of living. Wray remembers it very well & says so e.g. in the MM Primer. The JG is a voluntary thing for people who are subjected to the demands of the monetary economy. If people are independent, autarkic, self-employed, that is their business, more power to them. If they want, though, they could get a JG job if they feel like it. Why oppose this additional freedom for the self-employed?

You mean meaningful to Wray and ilk. Meaningful to the workers, the government / JG bureaucracy and the whole society. So you're one of the ilk too.

If you propose to divide labor with other people, you have to come to an agreement with them on the goals and terms. That's all the JG is - and hey, "other people" never agree with "my" absolutely perfect ideas and solutions. But that is never the real problem, compared to the omnipresent heritage of irrational monetary-economics beliefs.

Fine, compare the JG to slavery. MMT academics are unwise to recoil at such comparisons (e.g. from Paul Davidson IIRC), which can be enlightening. But then you should compare any job whatsoever to slavery. You should compare any division of labor toward any purpose to slavery too.

The question then is - what sort of slavery is a monetary economy without a JG: It is the slavery of a death camp or West Indian slavery, where the slave is considered as a consumable resource. It is slavery with a whip - but with no food for the slaves. US Southern slavery could be like that, but could also be like the next, more common type.

A JG is then more like ancient slavery, which tended to treat slaves more like valuable capital. In fact, I would say that a JG is even more like the "slavery" of the army of Spartacus to Spartacus or the Haitian revolutionaries to Toussaint L'Ouverture, or the citizens of any democratic state to its government. So if you use "slavery" for the JG, you should use it and see it in anything at all.

Tom Hickey said...

"A JG is then more like ancient slavery, which tended to treat slaves more like valuable capital. In fact, I would say that a JG is even more like the "slavery" of the army of Spartacus to Spartacus or the Haitian revolutionaries to Toussaint L'Ouverture, or the citizens of any democratic state to its government. So if you use "slavery" for the JG, you should use it and see it in anything at all."

History has a liberal bias, as economic historians like Michael Hudson point out. Slavery as ownership was increasingly replaced by serfs bound to the land, then tenant farmers and factory workers that were caught up in debt servitude. Now we seem to be at another transition point in developed countries.

Once ownership and transfer of private property beyond actual present use were established in law and custom, then the institutional structure was grounded on power and ownership of the means of production. Historically, monarchy as absolute despotism was replaced by aristocracy and feudalism, and feudalism was replaced by capitalism. So the power structure is becoming more liberalized. Instead of one being free, and then a few being free, now many are free, but in comparison with the population as a whole, that remains small.

The means of oppression and exploitation has been largely a result of lack of general education. Lacking knowledge and organizational skill, the oppressed were not able to govern effectively even if they rose up and seized power, so most populist revolutions just resulted with a shift of faces occupying the power structure.

Ravi Batra analyses social structure into four classes, the warriors, the intelligentsia, the acquisitors and the laborers. Power alternates cyclically among the first three with a fourth period being characterized by an alliance of acquisitors and laborers, but with the acquisitors still in charge.

The question is whether this is the time for labor to accede to a position of power in a new cycle. Batra doesn't foresee that happening, but I think it will at some point as the general level of collective consciousness rises.

Malmo's Ghost said...

One rarely hears of a grunt worker singing the praises of everyday work. It's usually those in warm cushy places in the employment spectrum fronting for the wonderfulness of "work"--the 10%. Let the college professor spend 20 years in hard labor and see where she comes down on the glory of "work". LOL.

Matt Franko said...

Hey F.,

Can you give me chapter and verse where the Israelites are identified as "slaves" in Egypt and where it says they were "working on the pyramids"?

I must have missed those parts...