2023年7月14日金曜日

Ep. 5 - The Right To A Job ft. Pavlina Tcherneva 2023/07/14

ーーー 

Ep. 5 - The Right To A Job ft. Pavlina Tcherneva 2023/07/14


8:50
12:36



can you say some more about this supposed trade-off between unemployment and inflation?
 yeah this is such an important Article of Faith that in economic theory there is this tradeoff
known as The Philips curve or the nairu.
the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment and that somehow is this like ideal case of unemployment.
 where we might have stable prices so the primary tool is job losses and I'm afraid I have to inform you you are all dismissed all of this is just based on bad economics.
it is not empirically supported Jerome Powell under oath was saying the relationship between slack in the
economy or unemployment and inflation was a strong one 50 years ago.
 and that that has gone away you know I'm reminded of ketta Scott King's famous quote.
because she was a big champion of the job guarantee and she argued that only the unemployed are called upon to be sacrificial Lambs on the altar of fighting inflation.

K:
失業率とインフレ率のトレードオフについて、もう少し詳しく教えてください。
T:
 そう、これは重要な信条なんだ。
フィリップス曲線あるいはナイル曲線として知られている。
失業のインフレ率が加速しないこと、そして失業の理想的なケースのようなものです。
 物価が安定し、雇用が失われることが第一の手段なのだが、残念ながら、これはすべて悪い経済学に基づいているに過ぎない。
ジェローム・パウエルは宣誓の下で、経済のたるみや失業率とインフレの関係は実証的に裏付けられていないと述べた。
経済のたるみ、あるいは失業率とインフレの関係は、50年前には強いものだった。
 それがなくなってしまったというのなら、私はケッタ・スコット・キングの有名な言葉を思い出す。
彼女は雇用保証の大ファンであり、失業者だけがインフレとの戦いの祭壇で生け贄の羊として求められるのだと主張したからだ。

邦訳

20:41~









8:46
12:43
Coretta Scott King


コレッタ・スコット・キング(1927年4月27日 – 2006年1月30日)は、アメリカ合衆国の作家、活動家、政治運動指導者、そしてマーティン・ルーサー・キング・ジュニアの妻であった。アラバマ州女性の殿堂に登録され、ジョージア州議会議事堂にて（顕彰と弔問のため）遺体安置が行われた最初のアフリカ系アメリカ人である[1]。コレッタ・スコットは「公民権運動のファーストレディ」と呼ばれている[2]。




1:45
how do we currently measure unemployment

 and feel free to tackle some of what you don't like about the way we do it currently. Yeah, that's right. 

When people hear the unemployment numbers ... today we hear that they're very low, historically low. We're at full employment or something called over full employment or whatever that means. But basically, we have a statistical agency that tries to assess who's looking for work and they have a pretty narrow definition. 

They sample 50,000 people and then they extrapolate for the population as a whole. And then they ask them, are you employed? And, person may say no, and then they will inquire, why not? And if the person says that they have not been able to find work, they will also ask them: well, did you look and how long ago did you look?

 So the bottom line is, if you have been looking for work in the last four weeks and you have not successfully found a job, you will be counted as officially unemployed. But if you have been looking for three months, for six months, for a year, but not in the last four weeks, you actually will not be counted. 

And if you have been discouraged altogether and stopped looking, you also won't be counted.

 So there are some of these very basic fundamentals that we have a very, very narrow definition of who's active. And by that we mean who's actively looking. 

But if we are really asking the question, how many people need jobs, we really need to be looking at much broader, more expanded definitions. 

So the Bureau of Labor Statistics has alternative measures. It does have more expanded definitions, which you don't hear about in the news. And those definitions recognize that some people may not have been able to look for the last month. So they will include people who have been looking for the last year or the previous year. Some of these definitions will also include people who are discouraged or they say that they just don't see any prospects, and that's why they've stopped looking. 

But they might also include people who are working only part time, which is also another interesting statistical artifact. You can be counted as employed even if you worked one hour in the previous week. And so you might be looking for more than one hour, right? You might be looking for a full time job. So we have this category called part time for economic reasons, meaning you can't find full time work. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics will have some expanded definitions. And if you look at them normally, you would find that about twice as many people are in need of work according to these statistics. But even that is, I think, kind of the of the baseline, the most I would say narrow way of looking at how many people need work because 

there are just so many folks who would take a job if one were provided. 

1:45
現在、失業率をどのように測定しているか

 そして、現在の測定方法の何が気に入らないか、自由に取り組んでください。ええ、その通りです。

失業率の数字を聞くと......今日、私たちは「非常に低い、歴史的に低い」と聞きます。完全雇用とか、完全雇用を超えたとか、そういうことだ。しかし、基本的には、誰が仕事を探しているかを評価する統計機関があり、彼らはかなり狭い定義を持っている。

5万人をサンプルにして、人口全体を推定するんだ。そして、「あなたは就職していますか？すると、その人は「いいえ」と答えるかもしれない。そして、もしその人が仕事を見つけることができなかったと答えたら、次のようにも尋ねる。

 要するに、過去4週間仕事を探していて、うまく仕事が見つからなかった場合、正式に失業者としてカウントされる。しかし、3ヶ月、6ヶ月、1年と求職活動をしていても、直近の4週間でなければカウントされない。

また、完全に落胆して探すのをやめた場合もカウントされない。


つまり、誰がアクティブなのかという、非常に基本的な定義があるのです。つまり、積極的に仕事を探している人ということだ。

しかし、どれだけの人が仕事を必要としているのか、ということを本当に問うのであれば、もっと広範で拡大された定義に目を向ける必要があります。

そこで、労働統計局には代替手段がある。ニュースではあまり耳にしませんが、労働統計局にはより広範な定義があります。その定義では、ここ1カ月間、仕事を見ることができなかった人がいることを認めています。そのため、昨年あるいは一昨年から探している人も含まれる。これらの定義の中には、落胆している人や、見込みがないから探すのをやめたと言う人も含まれる。

しかし、パートタイムでしか働いていない人も含まれている可能性があり、これも統計学的に興味深い事実である。前の週に1時間しか働いていなくても、雇用者としてカウントされることがある。だから、あなたは1時間以上の仕事を探しているかもしれない。フルタイムの仕事を探しているかもしれない。経済的な理由でパートタイムというカテゴリーがあります。ですから、労働統計局にはいくつかの拡大定義があります。この統計によると、仕事を必要としている人の数は約2倍になります。しかし、この統計でさえも、どれだけの人が仕事を必要としているかを見るための基本線、つまり最も狭い範囲での見方だと思います。

というのも、仕事が提供されるのであれば、それを受けようとする人はたくさんいるからだ。

 ーー

Ep. 5 - The Right To A Job ft. Pavlina Tcherneva 2023/07/14
https://youtu.be/Vufm7pG6bMM



FUNNY

MONEY

Andrés Bernal

Pavlina R Tcherneva


The Right to Employment: A recurring demand

• French Constitution of 1793

• New Deal 1930s

• Formal international recognition

• United Nations Charter 1945:

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948

• Treaties: e.g., International Covenant on Economic, Social, Cultural Rights (ICESCR)

• International Labor Organization

• National constitutions

• Civil Rights

• Green New Deal

• Democratizing Work

Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Feb. 4, 2021




FUNNY

MONEY

Andrés Bernal

Pavlina R Tcherneva


The Three Job Guarantees' in the GND

1) All hands on deck: industrial mobilization: guarantee that everyone

will participate. The socialization of investment.

■Job Guarantee with comparable income to miners

▪ Income Guarantee with generous retirement to FF workers


2) Safety net: for the most vulnerable who are guaranteed a job in the

green transition or in the green future


3) Employment stabilizer: the business cycle will not end once we've

cleaned up the environment


Pavlina R. Tcherneva, Feb. 4, 2021

Brown University, Watson


ファニー
マネー
アンドレス・ベルナル
パブリナ・R・チェルネヴァ

雇用の権利： 繰り返される要求
- 1793年フランス憲法
- 1930年代のニューディール
- 正式な国際的承認
- 国連憲章 1945年
- 世界人権宣言（1948年
- 条約：経済的、社会的、文化的権利に関する国際規約（ICESCR）など
- 国際労働機関
- 各国憲法
- 公民権
- グリーン・ニューディール
- 労働の民主化
パブリナ・R・チェルネヴァ 2021年2月4日




ファニー
マネー
アンドレス・ベルナル
パブリナ・チェルネワ

GNDにおける「3つの雇用保証
1）全員参加：産業動員：全員が参加することを保証する。
を保証する。投資の社会化。
鉱山労働者に同等の所得を与える雇用保証
FF労働者への手厚い退職金付き所得保証

2) セーフティネット：最も弱い立場の人々に対して、グリーン転換期またはグリーン未来における仕事を保証する。
セーフティネット：グリーン・トランジションまたはグリーン・フューチャーでの雇用を保証される最も弱い立場の人々

3) 雇用安定剤：環境浄化が完了しても、景気循環は終わらない。
環境浄化

パブリナ・R・チェルネヴァ 2021年2月4日
ブラウン大学、ワトソン



38:48
What is the job guarantee?

40:47
 Some case studies outside of the United States.


38:48
Yeah, let's just start with the basics. What is the job guarantee? 

It's a policy, a public policy that says if you need work, we will guarantee it. Come to employment office and you're seeking decent employment. You know what we might call a basic job that provides essential living wage, living wages and benefits, then that will be provided through the public sector. No ifs, ands or buts, not conditional on whether you have done X, Y, and Z. It is it's just a public option, if you will. It's a public employment opportunity that is direct. The projects are created in the community and people can then apply and take up those local jobs because it's a public employment opportunity. It also is proposed to serve the public purpose, right? We're not competing with Ford and producing cars or, you know, tires or whatever. We are addressing essential problems in the community. Care needs, environmental needs, work that is typically under provisioned, too anyhow. So the job guarantee has this dual objective of providing employment for those who need and producing something of social value for the community. It's a jobs program, but it does have some import and structural features. If that were open ended, if the program were universal, if it were implemented in every corner of the country, then it will have some profound impacts, I think, on the labor market and the way the economy works.


ええ、基本的なことから始めましょう。雇用保証とは何か？

仕事が必要なら保証しますよ、という公的政策だ。雇用事務所に来て、まともな雇用を求めている。必要不可欠な生活賃金、生活賃金、福利厚生を提供する基本的な仕事と呼べば、それは公的部門を通じて提供される。X、Y、Zをやったかどうかという条件もない。直接的な公共雇用の機会なのだ。プロジェクトは地域に生まれ、人々は応募して地元で雇用される。また、公共的な目的のために提案されたものでもあります。私たちはフォードと競合して自動車やタイヤを生産しているわけではありません。私たちは地域社会の本質的な問題に取り組んでいるのです。介護の必要性、環境の必要性、一般的に供給が不足している仕事などです。つまり、雇用保証には、雇用を必要としている人々に雇用を提供し、地域社会に社会的価値のあるものを生み出すという2つの目的があるのです。これは雇用プログラムだが、いくつかの重要な構造的特徴を持っている。もしこの制度がオープンエンドで、普遍的なものであり、国の隅々まで実施されるのであれば、労働市場や経済の仕組みに大きな影響を与えることになると思います。


 I want to actually get into some case studies. Has anyone tried this before? Maybe cases outside of the United States that we can point to? 

Yes. I mean, we I already talked a little bit about the New Deal of the thirties that had such a huge range of projects for the unemployed. And they were both creative projects, art projects. They were history projects. They were projects for musicians as well as infrastructure projects. Now, I want to say that especially the Civilian Conservation Corps was so, so popular with people that they considered it really to be their right, that the government did owe them a job. But the program was not reauthorized. So when you look around the world, typically there are large and small programs, but they tend to be temporary. Usually they're put in place in the middle of a crisis. 
We can think of the Argentina Plan Jefe as you have this program that was implemented as a direct employment program to deal with the crisis of 2001. We have projects that are ... the employment stimulus in South Africa. That was a direct employment program to deal with the unemployment problem that stemmed from COVID. These are large scale. There are smaller programs and they target particular groups. 

実際にケーススタディに取り組んでみたい。どなたか試したことのある方はいらっしゃいますか？もしかしたら、アメリカ国外の事例を挙げることができるかもしれません。

ええ、30年代のニューディール政策についてはすでに少し触れましたが、失業者のためのプロジェクトは実に多岐にわたっていました。それは創造的なプロジェクトであり、アートプロジェクトでもあった。歴史プロジェクトもあった。音楽家のためのプロジェクトもあれば、インフラ整備プロジェクトもあった。特に市民自然保護隊は、人々にとても人気があり、彼らはそれが自分たちの権利であり、政府は彼らに仕事を与える義務があると考えた。しかし、このプログラムは再承認されなかった。世界中を見渡せば、大小さまざまなプログラムがあるが、それらは一時的なものになりがちだ。通常は危機の最中に導入される。
アルゼンチンのプラン・ジェフェを考えてみると、2001年の危機に対処するために直接雇用プログラムとして実施されたこのプログラムがある。南アフリカの雇用刺激策もそうだ。これはCOVIDに端を発する失業問題に対処するための直接雇用プログラムでした。これらは大規模なものです。小規模なプログラムもあり、特定のグループを対象としています。

So in the UK, actually in many, many countries there are direct employment programs for the youth, but they are very small, really, really small. They're very effective and seem to have good results. But they again, temporary and they're not at the scale to address the youth unemployment problem in Europe. There are programs that specifically target the long term unemployed. As I said, there are major scarring effects and once you are unemployed, it's actually the longer you stay unemployed, the harder it is to get back into the labor market in addition to the other problems that I explained. 
So in Europe, there are some very interesting and notable experiments called the Zero Long-Term Unemployment areas (TZCLD) that was launched in France with a reasonable success, so much so that the program was expanded, a budget was appropriated for it at the national level, and it now covers most regions in France. However, again, it needs to be scaled up to address the problem of unemployment. Here we are targeting only the long term unemployed. Austria has a really interesting, similar program for the long term unemployed, the one program that I want to single out, the permanent program is in India, and that's the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. 


英国では、そして実際には多くの国で、若者のための直接雇用プログラムがある。それらは非常に効果的で、良い結果をもたらしているようです。しかし、それもまた一時的なもので、ヨーロッパの若年失業問題に対処できる規模ではありません。特に長期失業者を対象としたプログラムがあります。一度失業すると、その影響が大きく、失業期間が長ければ長いほど、説明したような他の問題に加えて、労働市場に復帰するのが難しくなります。
ヨーロッパでは、長期失業ゼロ地域（TZCLD）と呼ばれる非常に興味深く注目すべき実験がフランスで行われ、それなりの成功を収めた。しかし、失業問題に対処するためには、やはり規模を拡大する必要がある。ここでは長期失業者のみを対象としている。オーストリアには、長期失業者を対象とした実に興味深い類似のプログラムがあります。私が特筆したいのは、インドにある恒久的なプログラム、全国農村雇用保証法です。


This is the only program, to my knowledge, that is implemented as a matter of a basic human right. It doesn't guarantee open ended universal access to everyone. It's only for rural households and it only guarantees 100 days of work. But you don't have to be unemployed to access it. It is guaranteed as a basic human right. You can avail it yourself no matter your circumstance. 

これは私の知る限り、基本的人権の問題として実施されている唯一のプログラムである。この制度は、すべての人に開放的で普遍的なアクセスを保証するものではない。農村部の世帯のみが対象で、100日間の就労が保証されているだけだ。しかし、失業者でなくても利用できる。基本的人権として保障されている。どのような状況にあろうと、自分で利用することができる。

So it's a very interesting program because it is very large. It covers I mean, India is a big country, but it covers around 30% of all rural households. So it's interesting to see how very poor regions are actually able to create employment opportunities to see the impact and to do this on a regular basis because the program is not temporary. If you're entitled by law to it. So there are challenges there. And no doubt, in this kind of neo liberal paradigm, the fastest way to undermine a program is to underfund it. And India's definitely suffering from that. Nevertheless, it's interesting because it has provided a critical lifeline and people are demanding more. They're asking for 200 days. They are asking for expansion to rural areas. They're asking for, again, creating projects and specifically targeting youth, etc.. So there are other very interesting programs that marry the direct employment approach with some other problem. 

非常に大規模で、興味深いプログラムです。インドは大きな国ですが、農村部の全世帯の約30％をカバーしています。ですから、非常に貧しい地域が実際に雇用機会を創出し、その影響を見ることができるのは興味深いことですし、このプログラムは一時的なものではありませんから、定期的に実施することができます。なぜなら、この制度は一時的なものではないからです。ですから、そこには課題があります。このような新自由主義のパラダイムでは、プログラムを弱体化させる最も手っ取り早い方法は資金不足であることは間違いありません。インドは間違いなくそれに苦しんでいる。とはいえ、このプログラムは重要なライフラインを提供しており、人々はさらに多くのことを要求しています。200日にしてほしい。農村部への拡大を求めている。また、プロジェクトを立ち上げ、特に若者をターゲットにすることなどを求めている。このように、直接雇用のアプローチと他の問題を融合させた非常に興味深いプログラムは他にもある。

Ethiopia, for example, uses the direct employment approach to deal with droughts, with food insecurity, etc.. So I think that if we look, we will find some good case studies that teach us what a job guarantee might look like and what some of the effects are. But this is still, I would say, a non-conventional approach. You know, typically policymakers don't think of providing a job to a person who needs a job. And it is paradoxical because we tend to think about direct provisioning for so many things, maybe not in the US, but if you don't have retirement income, we guarantee Social Security, right? We provide retirement income, right? If you don't have food, we guarantee access to food. But if you don't have a job, we do not guarantee employment. We provide a little bit of income and send you on your way. We might provide a little bit of training for jobs that are not there. And so the direct employment approach, I think is prime for taking center stage and for reconsideration as a key policy for full employment. Well, and price stability and economic security and environmental renewal, you name it. 

たとえばエチオピアでは、干ばつや食糧不安などに対処するために直接雇用のアプローチを採用している。ですから、雇用保証がどのようなもので、どのような効果があるのかを教えてくれる良いケーススタディが、探せばいくつか見つかると思います。しかし、これはまだ型にはまったアプローチではない。通常、政策立案者は仕事を必要としている人に仕事を提供しようとは考えない。アメリカではそうではないかもしれませんが、退職所得がない場合、社会保障制度がありますよね？私たちは退職所得を保証しますよね？食料がなければ、食料へのアクセスを保証する。しかし、仕事がなければ、雇用は保証しない。私たちは少しばかりの収入を提供し、その道を歩んでもらいます。仕事がない場合は、その仕事のためのトレーニングを提供することもある。直接雇用のアプローチは、完全雇用のための重要な政策として、中心的な役割を果たし、再考されるべきものだと思います。また、物価の安定、経済安全保障、環境再生など、何でもありです。

47:00
～～～

38:51雇用保証とは何ですか? 

それは、 「38:58仕事が必要なら、私たちが保証します」という政策であり、公共政策です。
39:03雇用オフィスに来てください、そしてあなたはまともな仕事を探しています。
39:09 必要不可欠な生活賃金、 39:14 生活賃金と福利厚生を提供する基本的な仕事と呼ばれるものは
、公共部門を通じて提供されます。
39:20「もし」、「もし」、「しかし」、「X」「Y」「Z」を実行したかどうかの条件はありません。
39:27そうしたいのであれば、それは単なる公共のオプションです。それは直接的な公共雇用の機会
39:33 です。プロジェクトはコミュニティで作成されます
39:39 そして人々は応募して取り組むことができます
39:44公共雇用の機会だから地元の仕事。
39:52公共の目的を果たすことも提案されていますよね？私たちはフォードと競合して車
やタイヤなどを生産しているわけではありません。私たちはコミュニティ内の本質的な問題に
40:04 取り組んでいます。
ケアのニーズ、環境のニーズ、通常は 40:09 の仕事がとにかく不足しています。したがって、雇用保証には、
40:17 必要とする人々に雇用を提供するという 40:23 目的と、
地域社会に社会的価値のあるものを生み出すという 2 つの目的があります。
40:28これは雇用プログラムですが、いくつかのインポート機能と
40:33構造的機能があります。もしそれが無制限であり、プログラムが普遍的であれば、
40:38それが国の隅々まで実施されれば、
40:44労働市場と経済の仕組みに重大な影響を与えると思います。

40:50
 I want to actually get into some case studies. Has anyone tried this before? Maybe cases outside of the United States that we can point to? 

実際に40:49 のいくつかのケーススタディを見ていきたいと思います。誰かこれを試したことがありますか? 
もしかしたら、40:54 で指摘できる米国以外のケースもあるでしょうか? 

はい。つまり、失業者向けに
非常に幅広いプロジェクトを行った 41:00 30 年代のニューディールについてはすでに少し話しました。
そしてそれらは両方ともクリエイティブなプロジェクト、アートプロジェクトでした。
41:11それらは歴史的なプロジェクトでした。これらはミュージシャン向けのプロジェクトであると同時に、
41:16 インフラストラクチャ プロジェクトでもありました。さて、私が言いたいのは、特に
41:21 民間保全隊は人々の間で非常に人気があり、彼らが考えたほどだったということです。
41:27政府が彼らに仕事を負っているのは、まさに彼らの権利である。
41:34しかし、プログラムは再認証されませんでした。したがって、世界を見回すと
、通​​常、大小さまざまなプログラムがありますが、それらは
一時的なものになる傾向があります。通常、それらは危機の真っ只中に導入されます。
41:50アルゼンチン計画ジェフェについて考えることができます。このプログラムは
41:562001 年の危機に対処するための直接雇用プログラムとして実施されました。
42:02私たちには、…南アフリカの雇用刺激となるプロジェクトがあります。
42:08それは、
新型コロナウイルスに起因する失業問題に対処するための直接雇用プログラムでした。これらは大規模です。もっと小さなプログラムもありますし、
42:19彼らは特定のグループをターゲットにしています。ですから、英国では、実際、多くの、
42:24多くの国で、若者向けの直接雇用プログラムがありますが、それは非常に小規模で、
42:29本当に、本当に小規模です。とても効果的で、良い結果が出ているようです。しかし、それらは
再び一時的なものであり、ヨーロッパの若者の失業問題
42:41 に対処できる規模ではありません。
42:46の長期失業者を特にターゲットにしたプログラムがあります。先ほども言いましたが、大きな傷跡効果があり、
42:51 一度失業してしまうと、失業期間が長くなるほど、
42:57 説明した他の問題に加えて、労働市場に戻るのが難しくなります。ヨーロッパには非常に興味深いものがいくつかあります
43:02そして、フランスで開始された長期失業ゼロ
地域（TZCLD）と呼ばれる注目に値する実験はそれなりの成功を収め、
43:13プログラムが拡張されるほどに、
国家予算がそのための予算として割り当てられた 43:19レベルが向上し、現在では
フランスのほとんどの地域を 43:24 カバーしています。しかし、繰り返しになりますが、
失業問題に対処するには規模を拡大する必要があります。今回は長期失業者のみを対象とします。
43:34オーストリアには、長期失業者のための非常に興味深い同様のプログラムがあります。43 
:40私が取り上げたいプログラムは、恒久的なプログラムがインドにあり、それが43:46全国
農村雇用保証法です。私の知る限り、これが唯一のプログラムです。
43:51それは基本的人権の問題として実施されます。
43:56誰もが無制限に普遍的にアクセスできることを保証するものではありません。これは田舎の
44:02 世帯のみを対象としており、保証されるのは 100 日間の労働のみです。ただし、
失業していなくてもアクセスできるわけではありません。それは基本的人権として保障されています。
44:14 状況に関係なく、自分で利用できます。非常に大きいため、これは非常に興味深い
44:19 プログラムです。つまり、インドは
44:25 の大国ですが、農村部の全世帯の約 30% をカバーしています。
したがって、 44:30非常に貧しい地域が実際に
雇用の機会を創出して効果を確認し、
44:41プログラムは一時的なものではないため、これを定期的に行うことができるかどうかを見るのは興味深いことです。
44:47法律によってそれを受ける権利がある場合。したがって、そこには課題があります。そして間違いなく、
44:52 この種の新自由主義パラダイムにおいて、プログラムを弱体化させる最も手っ取り早い方法は、そのプログラムに資金を不足させることです。
44:58そしてインドは間違いなくそれに苦しんでいます。それにもかかわらず、
45:04これは重要なライフラインを提供しており、
45:09人々はさらに多くを求めているため、興味深いのです。彼らは200日を要求しています。
彼らは地方の45:15地域への拡大を求めている。彼らは再び、プロジェクトを作成し、特に
若者などをターゲットにすることを求めています。したがって、
直接雇用アプローチと他の問題を結びつける非常に興味深いプログラムが他にもあります。
45:32例えばエチオピアは干ばつに対処するために直接雇用アプローチを採用している。
45:37食糧不安など。だから、調べてみれば、
45:43
雇用保証がどのようなものか、そしてその影響がどのようなものかを教えてくれる、良い事例がいくつか見つかると思います。
45:54 しかし、これはやはり、型破りなアプローチだと言えます。ご存知のように、政策立案者は通常、
仕事を必要としている人に仕事を提供することを考えていません。そして、46:05これは逆説的です
。なぜなら、私たちは非常に多くのものに対して直接の準備を考える傾向があるからです。46 
:12米国ではないかもしれませんが、退職所得がない場合、私たちは社会保障を保証しますよね？私たちは
46:18の退職金を提供しますよね？食べ物がない場合は、食べ物へのアクセスを保証します。しかし
46:23仕事がない場合、私たちは雇用を保証しません。私たちは少しの収入を提供します
46:29 そしてあなたを送り出します。存在しない仕事については、ちょっとしたトレーニングを提供するかもしれません。
46:34したがって、直接雇用アプローチは、完全雇用に向けた重要な政策
として、 46:40注目を集め、再検討するのに最適
な政策であると私は思います。そうですね、価格
46:52 安定性、経済的安全性、環境再生など、何でも構いません。

46:57そこで、ここ米国では、
雇用保証プログラムを求める議会決議が 47:02 アヤンナ・プレスリー下院議員によって提出されました。そしてそれは
47:08 あなたの仕事、ポリシーリンクや現代貨幣理論コミュニティのようなグループの仕事から来ています
一般的に47:13。ここで、47:18米国ベースの雇用保証政策がどのようなものかを少し詳しく説明できますか
? 


47:24それについて私が本当に重要で特別だと思うのは、それが私の意見では、
47:29少なくとも、そして私たち全員がそうだと思うのですが、
47:35さまざまな意味で、そしてその一部であるグリーン・ニューディールの中心であるということです。 

Welcome back to Funny Money. This is the podcast about the economy, how it works and how it can work better. And today we're talking about jobs. That's right. We have a great episode for you because last time, if you remember, we talked about the Green New Deal, but we didn't go that much into depth about one of its most important parts, and that is the federal job guarantee. The way the economy works right now is we intentionally keep a bunch of people out of a job, and it doesn't need to be that way. And we have the best person to explain why and how: Pavlina Tcherneva. This is going to change the way everyone thinks about the economy and the world. I think so. I agree. I agree with that. This is a big one. So without further ado, Pavlina Tcherneva is a full professor of economics at Bard College, the director of the Open Society University Networks, Economic Democracy Initiative and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. She specializes in modern money and public policy. Pavlina, what an honor. Thank you for being with us. Hello. Hello. Very nice to be here. I hope we can meet the expectations. Yes. We're so happy to have you on. We're going to get right into it because people need to eat dinner and that's very important. But people can't afford to eat dinner if they don't have good paying jobs. And that is the topic of a lot of what we'll be discussing today. And I think it's really important because we all have these ideas based on what they see on the news. And if people bother to tune in to congressional hearings or what the Federal Reserve is saying. But we hear a lot of narratives about employment and unemployment. So one of the first things we hear is we get these jobs reports. People talk about what the unemployment numbers are. So we're really interested to hear 

1:45
how do we currently measure unemployment

 and feel free to tackle some of what you don't like about the way we do it currently. Yeah, that's right. 

When people hear the unemployment numbers ... today we hear that they're very low, historically low. We're at full employment or something called over full employment or whatever that means. But basically, we have a statistical agency that tries to assess who's looking for work and they have a pretty narrow definition. 

They sample 50,000 people and then they extrapolate for the population as a whole. And then they ask them, are you employed? And, person may say no, and then they will inquire, why not? And if the person says that they have not been able to find work, they will also ask them: well, did you look and how long ago did you look?

 So the bottom line is, if you have been looking for work in the last four weeks and you have not successfully found a job, you will be counted as officially unemployed. But if you have been looking for three months, for six months, for a year, but not in the last four weeks, you actually will not be counted. 

And if you have been discouraged altogether and stopped looking, you also won't be counted.

 So there are some of these very basic fundamentals that we have a very, very narrow definition of who's active. And by that we mean who's actively looking. 

But if we are really asking the question, how many people need jobs, we really need to be looking at much broader, more expanded definitions. 

So the Bureau of Labor Statistics has alternative measures. It does have more expanded definitions, which you don't hear about in the news. And those definitions recognize that some people may not have been able to look for the last month. So they will include people who have been looking for the last year or the previous year. Some of these definitions will also include people who are discouraged or they say that they just don't see any prospects, and that's why they've stopped looking. But they might also include people who are working only part time, which is also another interesting statistical artifact. You can be counted as employed even if you worked one hour in the previous week. And so you might be looking for more than one hour, right? You might be looking for a full time job. So we have this category called part time for economic reasons, meaning you can't find full time work. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics will have some expanded definitions. And if you look at them normally, you would find that about twice as many people are in need of work according to these statistics. But even that is, I think, kind of the of the baseline, the most I would say narrow way of looking at how many people need work because 

there are just so many folks who would take a job if one were provided. 


And we see this in another kind of statistical measure, and that is when we try to look at who's getting jobs, whenever people find employment, we're trying to say to ask the question, well, who are those folks? And many of them come from outside of the labor market. They're not captured by any of these measures that I just explained. So out there is some kind of hidden demand for work, a lot of it comes from caregivers, people who might say, well, no, I don't need a job because I have one at home. I'm taking care of children, I'm taking care of elderly parents. But if a good job comes along that can afford the family to take care of the elderly or the children and work, then they might take the employment opportunity. And then there would be others who don't report as being unemployed but might take employment. So there are lots of statistical artifacts. I particularly like to look at unemployment at a kind of a regional level, to look at every corner of the country, to see what's happening in the backyard, in your neighborhood, in a remote, rural or even metropolitan area, because the national statistics just don't capture these huge disparities. I mean, right now we're looking at 3.5% unemployment rates. But when you look at the West Coast, if you look at the Deep South, if you look at the Rust Belt, we have communities, towns that have unemployment rates double digit. And that is not just today. That is on a good day. That is in a bad day, that is just permanent high level of unemployment. So there are these statistics, official statistics we just described how poorly they capture the actual need for jobs. But if you look at the official statistics at the local level, you will find that on on a good day, there are communities that have double digit unemployment rates. And if you then break it down by group, say, young people, by race by age, you'll find that those levels are also much higher. So, no, I don't like to look at the national statistics. That's a baseline scenario. You want to take a look at what the official numbers are saying. But you got to look deeper to get a sense of what we're really talking about. I think it puts us in a really precarious position when we want to make an assessment about the health of our economy. And we talk a lot about the real economy here, because when you even have these figures supposedly measuring unemployment that aren't actually capturing what our productive capacity is when it comes to labor and who can actually work and who is working and who is not, it really makes it difficult to understand how there could possibly be this trade off between unemployed and inflation that they talk about so much. People hear Jerome Powell and talking heads say all the time these days that inflation is really bad for working people because our grocery bills are higher, energy bills are higher. And we feel that weight. And I'm just so sorry, but the trade off that needs to happen is more of you need to be unemployed to get these prices down so that we have balance in the economy because the labor market is hot.  

8:46
Can you say some more about this supposed, perhaps-make-believe-not-demonstrated-in-the-data tradeoff between unemployment and inflation? 

Yeah. This is such an important article of faith that economists have that there is some kind of law, regularity, economic rules that says that there is. Well, you can have the best of both worlds. You know, you can either have really, really tight labor market, low unemployment, good jobs, well-paying jobs, or you can have stable prices. And at some point, if you get way too many jobs that pay really good wages, God forbid people will spend those wages on production, on goods services, and they will then bid up those prices. You know, you go to the grocery store, too many of us go there and then all of a sudden the price of avocados goes up and voila, we have inflation and today people are experiencing inflation. And it's not because there are too many jobs or well-paying jobs. That's one thing we didn't say in the first segment that we're talking about, people who don't have jobs. But there are many, many people who have jobs that are very poorly paid, jobs that are precarious, jobs, unstable jobs. Those are part of the official employment numbers that show that we have a good economy. But it's not so good, actually. So we are experiencing inflation and we could get into what it is caused by, but certainly not because there is strong spending and strong income and labor markets. 

8:46
失業率とインフレ率のトレードオフについて、もう少し詳しく教えてください。

そうだ。これは経済学者が持つ重要な信念のようなもので、ある種の法則性、規則性、経済的なルールが存在するというものだ。まあ、両者のいいとこ取りをすることもできる。労働市場が本当に逼迫し、失業率が低く、良い仕事、高賃金の仕事があるか、物価が安定しているかのどちらかだ。そしてある時点で、本当に良い賃金を支払う仕事が増えすぎると、人々はその賃金を生産や商品サービスに費やすようになり、物価が上がってしまう。食料品店に行くと、突然アボカドの値段が上がり、インフレになる。それは仕事が多すぎるからでも、賃金の高い仕事がないからでもない。それは、私たちが最初のセグメントで言わなかったことで、仕事がない人々について話しているのです。しかし、非常に賃金の低い仕事、不安定な仕事、不安定な仕事に就いている人はたくさんいる。これらは、景気が良いことを示す公式の雇用者数の一部です。しかし、実際はそれほど良くない。インフレに見舞われているが、その原因が何であるかに迫ることはできる。

But the policymakers are looking at prices going up and energy prices, of stuff, of services, etc., and are saying, well, what are we going to do about this? This this takes a bite out of the purchasing power of every person. We need to make sure to stay that we can stabilize those prices. And what is their solution? Soften the labor market. And that's just jargon for create more unemployment, eliminate some jobs, diminish some of this purchasing power, even though the Federal Reserve recognizes explicitly that that inflation is not a cause of strong labor market, that jobs are not creating those inflationary pressures. So that's why I say that this is an article of faith that in economic theory there is this trade off known as the Phillips curve or as the more fancy name today that we use as the NAIRU, the non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. And then that somehow is this like ideal case of unemployment where we might have stable prices. 

しかし、政策立案者たちは、物価の上昇やエネルギー価格の上昇、物やサービスの価格上昇などを見て、こう言っている。これはすべての人の購買力を奪うものだ。我々は物価を安定させる必要がある。その解決策とは？労働市場を軟化させる。連邦準備制度理事会（FRB）は、インフレが強い労働市場の原因ではないこと、雇用がインフレ圧力を生み出しているのではないことを明確に認識しているにもかかわらず。だから私は、経済理論にはフィリップス曲線、あるいは今日私たちが使っているより洒落た呼び方としてNAIRU（失業率の非加速的インフレ率）と呼ばれるトレードオフが存在する、ということを信条としているのです。そして、物価が安定するような理想的な失業のケースもある。

And so the policymakers are searching for this number, for this magical number that's going to secure stable prices. And you will hear, you know, pundits, economists, mainstream economists, the Fed say, well, we might need to have elevated levels of unemployment for a few years in order to bring prices down. All of this is just based on bad economics. It is not empirically supported. Only two years ago, the very same Fed was questioning this very concept. Jerome Powell under oath was saying, well, this NAIRU relationship seems to have broken down, but we need to figure out what this relationship is, because the policymaker doesn't have another way of thinking about how to fight inflation. And so the primary tool is job losses.


 I'm reminded of Coretta Scott King's famous quote, because she was a big champion of the job guarantee, and she argued that only the unemployed are called upon to be sacrificial lambs on the altar of fighting inflation. So I think we have a broken economic paradigm. 

だから政策立案者たちは、物価を安定させる魔法の数字を探しているのだ。識者、エコノミスト、主流エコノミスト、FRBが、物価を下げるためには数年間失業率が上昇する必要があるかもしれない、と言うのを耳にするだろう。これらはすべて悪い経済学に基づいている。実証的な裏付けがない。わずか2年前、同じFRBがまさにこの概念に疑問を呈していた。ジェローム・パウエルは宣誓の上で、「NAIRUの関係は崩れたようだが、この関係を解明する必要がある。そのため、主要な手段は雇用の喪失である。


 コレッタ・スコット・キングの有名な言葉を思い出します。彼女は雇用保証の大ファンであり、失業者だけがインフレとの戦いの祭壇で生贄の子羊となるよう求められているのだと主張していました。つまり、経済パラダイムが崩壊しているのだ。

The profession hasn't really thought of another way of dealing with prices except by creating more unemployment. And I think that we I reject that outright and I think that we can create guaranteed employment, at least secure a basic job for anyone who needs it without creating inflationary pressures. So when I talk about this, I often say, well, the motivation for them doing this is there are a lot of people in power that are quite happy when wages are low and benefits are low and workers are not competing for the same job. So employers, they want it so many workers are competing for the same job so that they're willing to take a little bit less than what their labor is worth. Oftentimes a lot less than their labor is worth. So that profit margins are high. And a lot of times they say you just sound like you really hate corporate America, right? You sound like a raging commie. That's not how it works, but it's often reflected in the data that this relationship is not there. It's something that Jerome Powell has said on the floor of Congress, that this relationship really isn't as strong as it used to be. He said this, and then went on to a period of interest rate hikes, month over month with this explanation that this is why he's doing it. The exact logic he argued against on the floor of Congress just three years ago. So we have a chart that's showing what the natural rate of unemployment, which is something that's said a lot, basically the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment that you just described, where they predict we expect if unemployment is at this level, inflation will be relatively stable. So I guess my question is, have there been periods where unemployment was high, but inflation was not? Yes, lots of them. We can leave that chart up. And being helpful. We have had periods where unemployment was very, very low and inflation was very, very low. I mean, the nineties was an example of that. We had again 3.5%, which was lower than what we had seen in the previous four decades. No inflation in sight. In fact, we haven't had really any substantive inflation since the oil shock of the seventies. We really worried and that's what the Fed worries more about. It's deflation. After the great financial crisis, when we had mass unemployment and a global kind of collapse of the financial system of production, we had, you know, zero inflation negative inflation. Japan is a classic case of a country that has been flirting with deflation, which means prices are coming down. And you might think this is a good thing, but it's not really a great thing. So the reason why I say that the Fed is afraid of deflation far more than inflation is because what that means is people are selling stuff, they're selling their inventories, they might be selling their houses, incomes are falling, profits are falling. So when you have deflation, you just have a general rise, kind of a decline in the value of things. And that's not a good thing. You want to have a little bit of inflation. So the Fed has been trying to engineer that little bit of inflation after the great financial crisis without much luck. Okay. And we then entered this kind of unusual period in the recovery post pandemic. And we started seeing inflation coming from the various bottlenecks, from the disruptions, the logistical issues around shipping and restarting the supply chain. There's energy; energy costs increases as a result of the war in Ukraine and various other factors. But these are all on the cost side. And I think there's a general consensus that inflation is coming from these disruptions. And corporate America is also taking advantage of this moment and increasing their profit margins. So it's not that the Fed engineered inflation. They've been trying to do this since 2008. They were unsuccessful. We are seeing inflation because the pandemic engineered it because of the disruptions and because firms are taking advantage of this moment to raise their prices. So it's not the Fed. But what is the Fed charged with? They're charged with securing stable prices. But I should also say the Fed in the United States has a dual mandate. They're supposed to secure a maximum employment and stable prices. It used to be full employment and price stability. Now, not all central banks have the same kind of mandate. So when you think back to the trade off, the Fed is supposed to give us both stable prices and full employment, but it has to choose because it believes it has a trade off. Currently the Fed is facing inflation. So what are they going to do? They're going to use unemployment to tame these wage increases that come not from the labor market. So it's a real problem because they are not able to engineer inflation, they're not able to tame it. I mean, they've been increasing interest rates for a year and inflation is coming down on its own. Whether or not they had raised interest rates, inflation would have come down because we're working through these bottlenecks and these logistical problems. So the Fed is actually quite impotent in managing the economy or making creating what they are hoping is the soft landing. What the Fed can do is they can break things so they can increase interest rates to such level that things start falling apart. People can't afford their mortgages. The small business owner cannot get a loan to pay the wage bill. And then we have like business shutdowns. So we are teetering towards that moment where they actually going to create quite a lot of unemployment if they continue this aggressive interest rate increases. And for those of you who are watching this live and saw the chart, you would notice that when unemployment increases, it doesn't just tick up. It doesn't just slowly go up, it shoots up, it accelerates. So that's what I mean by the Fed breaks things when it's the Fed's role. But in many cases it is other causes for the recession, whether it's the financial crisis, whether it is a housing crash, whether it is some other. In the nineties it was the surplus. So there are various reasons why we enter recessions. But the Fed has far less power to give us a Goldilocks economy than most people believe. All right. To everyone's displeasure, I'm introducing a new character to our story, a character named Jason Furman. If you haven't heard of Jason Furman, he was appointed by Barack Obama to be the chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and then also for the National Economic Council, where he was a deputy there. He just so happens to be the heir to a real estate and shopping center tycoon. 


Let's watch this video of this villain in our story. 

20:41
What do you think the unemployment rate needs to look like in the United States to become, quote, “stable”? I don't know. Look, if you want to get inflation to 2.0, I think you need an unemployment rate in the sixes. In the sixes if you want to get to 2.0. Okay. That's that's a that's a massive shift from where we are today. I don't think we need to be at 2.0, though. I think if the Fed gets to 2.99, okay, but to get to 2.99, so we need to be at 4.5. Do we need to be at four? What is it? What is that in your mind? I would guess around 4.5 to 5 and these things are super hard to contain. Is that politically palatable? And that's why we have central banks has to make tough choices. 

So what kind of model do we think Jason Furman is just running in his head there to spin out these numbers like this? It's really impressive. The computing power in his brain. What kind of data is he taking in and putting back up? Can you just say a little bit about, what's with hiking interest rates to throw people out of work? What do you make of what Furman said there?


Well, I mean, listen, it's not like he's volunteering himself to lose his job so we can tame inflation. It's always other people's jobs. Look, what's the model? Highly undemocratic, right? That's what he's saying. He's saying, thank goodness we have somebody who's not really accountable to the public to make the tough choices, to create enough unemployment, to fight inflation, because, number one, there is a broken theoretic model unverified by my statistical data, but it's the only thing they've got. And so they are turning to this kind of draconian tool of throwing people out of work to deal with inflation. It is just so morally bankrupt

 in addition to being just not good science. 


この物語の悪役のビデオを見てみましょう。 米国の失業率が「安定」するためにはどのような状態になる必要があると思いますか? わからない。 インフレ率を 2.0 に引き上げたいなら、失業率が 60 ％台になる必要があると思います。 2.0 に到達したい場合は 6 台です。 わかった。 それは、私たちが今日いる状況からの大きな変化です。 ただし、2.0 である必要はないと思います。 FRBが2.99に到達すれば問題ないと思いますが、2.99に到達するには4.5にする必要があります。 ４時にいる必要がありますか？ それは何ですか？ それは何ですか？ おそらく 4.5 ～ 5 くらいだと思いますが、これらを封じ込めるのは非常に困難です。 それは政治的に好ましいことですか？ だからこそ、中央銀行は難しい選択を迫られるのです。

それでは、ジェイソン・ファーマンが頭の中で実行して、このような数字を紡ぎ出すために、どのようなモデルを考えているのでしょうか? 本当に印象深いですね。 彼の脳の計算能力。 彼はどのような種類のデータを取り込んでバックアップしているのでしょうか? 人々を失業させるために金利を引き上げるということはどういうことなのか、少しだけ教えていただけますか? そこでファーマンが言ったことについてどう思いますか?


まあ、聞いてください、彼はインフレを抑えるために自ら進んで職を失っているわけではありません。 それは常に他人の仕事です。 ほら、モデルは何ですか？ 非常に非民主的ですよね？ それが彼が言っていることです。 彼が言っているのは、ありがたいことに、厳しい選択をしたり、十分な失業を生み出したり、インフレと闘ったりするために、国民に対して実際に説明責任を負わない人がいるからです、なぜなら第一に、私の統計データでは検証されていない壊れた理論モデルがあるからですが、それは 彼らが持っている唯一のもの。 そこで彼らは、インフレに対処するために人々を仕事から追い出すというこの種の過酷な手段に目を向けているのです。 それはまさに道徳的に破綻している

  科学が良くないだけでなく。

I mean, I'll give you many examples. After the great financial crisis, official reports that the European Commission were putting the natural rate of unemployment in Spain at 26%. So they're basically saying this is the most that the economy can create, and that is the unemployment rate that is consistent with stable prices. What kind of economic model is that to consider this to be unacceptable scenario? In the nineties we saw the same story play out. We came from the eighties in the early nineties, a very high level of unemployment and the unemployment level kept coming down and the early nineties, mid nineties and the Goldilocks breaking through every estimate of the NAIRU that was out there put forward by professional economists like Furman. I mean I don't know if he was actually one of them, but that was basically the profession. That's what central bankers were saying. The natural rate is 12%. No, no, no. The natural rate is 7%. And that unemployment rate keeps falling. No, no. The natural rate is 5%. So we can't these numbers can't be trusted. We need to really put this aside and start asking the hard questions. How can we make sure that people have good and stable jobs? And if there is inflation, how can we secure stable prices without throwing people out of work? I mean, you began the segment with what's a healthy Economy? And one of the most fundamental building blocks of a healthy economy are good, stable jobs. We can't have a model in which people are laid off, hired, fired, hired, fired, according to whatever the whims of market activity or changes in growth. I mean, we need to have some kind of sense of economic security and one of the fundamental prerequisites of economic security is having a good and stable job. But we don't have that, which is your chart shows us so, so clearly, because in the United States, unemployment is a huge yo yo. It goes up, it comes down. And again, this is just the official data. Behind the curtain, there are millions and millions and millions who are looking for work, would like to have work, but they don't have that access. Professor Tcherneva, you brought up avocados and it just reminds me of all of these articles that are written about how millennials are pushing up the prices on avocados. And I can tell you that we probably are. Just kidding. I think we need a Green New Deal for Avocados. But in truth, though, so many people that struggle with unemployment are young people. And that's kind of like something that that we see very often. One of the framings that you have offered in your work about unemployment is to understand it as an epidemic, as an infectious disease that starts to grow rapidly. We actually have a video that shows changes in the employment rate and changes in unemployment throughout the United States. If you are listening to us on a podcast, make sure you check it out in our show notes when you have a moment. So let's check out that video. Can you tell us a little bit about why you use that video in many of your lectures and what some of the insights are about these changes in unemployment? They don't affect everybody equally, right? Are there particular communities that are hit harder by by the phenomenon of unemployment? Yeah. This animated map of unemployment across the United States, I think is just really telling. And it provides a new and different perspective of how to think about the problem. The first thing that we notice is that there are communities, as I said earlier, that always have double digit unemployment rates. And some of these communities, we are really talking about 30, 40, 50% unemployment. But the video also goes through three periods of recessions in the early nineties, in the early 2000s, and after the great financial crisis. And what we find is that, well, unemployment behaves in a very particular way. There are almost, you can say, hot spots where the mass layoffs take place and then those layoffs ripple in the form of more layoffs throughout the community. And in a sense, unemployment kind of spreads from one epicenter to the periphery and further and further and further. And that is kind of the reliable result of a downturn of a recession, whatever its causes. And then we wait for the jobs to return, but they never quite return to the epicenter that is plagued by high levels of unemployment. And so if you consider the behavior of unemployment, there is one other kind of phenomenon that behaves this way, and that's really a viral spread. Epidemiologists, their models of disease spread and contagion actually look like this. So it's not just the metaphor, because this kind of behavior has some very important real consequences. The unemployment problem has social and human costs that typically economists don't consider. But you can find them in psychology. You can find them in studies of public health. I mean, they're intuitive things. You and I understand if you've seen somebody who's been unemployed for a very long time, you know that probably their mental health is not great, potentially their physical health, maybe their kids are not doing as well as you can, take them to the extracurriculars, provide for them. That has a material impact not just on the unemployed person, but on their family, on their children. So there are health costs, there are cost to the opportunities that their children and family members might have. And economists only look to a scarring effect, which is the lost income that's really not adequate. Virtually every social problem we can think of is in one way or another, linked to absence of jobs. And, you know, these communities that have very little like economic life or economic opportunity mean that they don't have mom and pop shops, they don't have the kind of businesses or community services that they need. And so we've talked about the so-called depths of despair that come with the loss of good, stable employment, with kind of the gutting out of the middle class and the loss of important jobs in some of these what used to be good manufacturing centers. So this map to me kind of explains how unemployment number one spreads. And again, we're talking only about the official data behind those numbers. There is perennial economic insecurity, people who are persistently experiencing these costs of unemployment. So if we were to think about employment creation or dealing with the problem of unemployment, I tend to think of it as a as a public health problem that we shouldn't do it when a crisis hits. We shouldn't be scratching our heads and saying, okay, well, now we have 10% unemployment. What shall we do? Well, let's just send some stimulus, some checks, and maybe we can just give some contracts, build a bridge That's too late. Thinking about unemployment in this way to address it when the crisis hits is we've already incurred the costs, we've already devastated the communities, and then it's jobs return far more slowly. So I tend to think about the problem in a preventative way. I'd much rather have kind of infrastructure that creates employment as needed, wherever it is needed, whoever needs it, young people, caregivers, people returning to the labor market, that that is an infrastructure that is on the ready, that provides employment, whatever the circumstance in every community. And would that would be a way of reversing these kind of perverse dynamics that we see through in this movie. So today, I think we're seeing a revival in a sense of really thinking about and grappling with the problem of unemployment, mostly thanks to your work. And I think of others like Darrick Hamilton and Sandy Darity. 

32:16

But there's been a long history of a fight for the right to employment and for the idea of something like full employment. I think we have some slides that that speak to this a bit. Can you take us through what these key points from this beautiful slide? 

Well, you know, this is important. The job image is not a new idea. But notice that at least one of the earliest mentions of securing the right to work is in 1793. Now, why is that? Like 1793 is well, it's the time of the first French Revolution, but also the time when the social relationships changed. Right. They changed in a way where people become far more dependent on markets and on wage work for their livelihoods. So, landed peasants have access to the resources to well, you know, I'm not selling landed peasantry or feudalism as a good economic model. But what I'm saying is that that was a fundamental transformation. So people need to read The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi to appreciate what a radical transformation of life that was to be removed from the land and to be able to to provide for yourself through wage work or not be able to provide for yourself through wage work. 

しかし、雇用の権利や完全雇用のようなものをめぐる闘いには長い歴史がある。 これについて少し説明したスライドがいくつかあると思います。 この美しいスライドから重要なポイントを説明してもらえますか?

そうですね、これは重要です。 仕事のイメージは新しいものではありません。 しかし、働く権利の確保に関する最も初期の言及の少なくとも 1 つは 1793 年であることに注目してください。では、なぜでしょうか? 1793年がそうだったように、それは最初のフランス革命の時期でしたが、社会関係が変化した時期でもありました。 右。 彼らは、人々が生計を立てるために市場と賃金労働にはるかに依存するように変化しました。 つまり、土地を持った農民は十分な資源にアクセスできるのです、ご存知のとおり、私は土地を持った農民や封建制を良い経済モデルとして売り込んでいるわけではありません。 しかし、私が言いたいのは、それは根本的な変革だったということです。 したがって、人々はカール・ポランニーの『大転換』を読んで、土地から追放され、賃金労働で自分を養えるか、あるいは賃金労働で自分を養えないかという生活の根本的な変革がどれほどのものだったかを理解する必要がある。 。

And so some of the early calls for the right to employment come then, when people realize how essential a job is to one's existence, and then fast forward, we have the industrial revolution, we have the emergence of the market economy rapidly evolving and rapidly changing highly unstable depression, depression, depression, depression. Just read Charles Dickens. That's the world of the 1800s of poverty, misery, Yes, opportunity, growth, things unseen. But as well as massive economic insecurity. And so yet again, the international community starts thinking, how shall we provide for this most basic, essential right as as it is understood. So in the United States, we had this conversation in the context of the Great Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a commission in the thirties to address the problems of unemployment, and that was front and center in his agenda. As we know, he created directly many, many jobs and many works projects. But the philosophy that guided this policy approach was that, first, economic security is fundamental for democracy because people out of work and out of a job hungry and out of a job at the stuff of which dictatorships are made, right. That was his quote. And he says, okay, well, how do we make sure that people are not out of a job and they're not hungry? Well, we need to have a two pronged approach. 

雇用の権利を求める初期の声のいくつかは、仕事が自分の生存にとってどれほど不可欠であるかを人々が認識したときに起こりました。そして、さらに早送りすると、産業革命が起こり、急速に進化する市場経済の出現が起こります。 非常に不安定なうつ病、うつ病、うつ病、うつ病が変化します。 チャールズ・ディケンズを読んでみてください。 それは、貧困、悲惨さ、そう、機会、成長、目に見えないものの1800年代の世界です。 しかし同時に大規模な経済不安もある。 そしてまたしても、国際社会は、理解されているこの最も基本的で不可欠な権利をどのように提供すべきかを考え始めます。 米国では、大恐慌の状況の中でこの会話が行われました。 フランクリン・デラノ・ルーズベルトは 30 年代に失業問題に取り組む委員会を設置し、それが彼の議題の中心でした。 私たちが知っているように、彼は多くの仕事と多くの作品プロジェクトを直接生み出しました。 しかし、この政策アプローチを導いた哲学は、第一に、経済安全保障が民主主義の基礎であるというものでした。なぜなら、人々は職を失い、飢え、独裁制を構成する材料で仕事を失っているからです。 それが彼の名言でした。 そして彼はこう言います、そうですか、人々が職を失ったり、飢えたりしないようにするにはどうすればよいでしょうか？ そうですね、2 つの側面からのアプローチが必要です。

The first one is provide employment security, and the second is income security. So we did a fair amount on both fronts during his administration, but it was not enough to deal with the massive unemployment problem. And then the problem from a policy perspective is that these were temporary measures. We ended up with kind of a system, a public system, welfare system, if you will, that largely prioritizes income support, but has forgotten that employment support and employment security is a key piece that was articulated yet again in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where the international community then understood that this is a fundamental, inalienable right. People should have access to jobs not as a reward for good behavior, not because they are productive or they have done the right things the way we typically think of employment today, but that the right to employment, along with a series of other economic, social, political rights are inalienable and they are to be guaranteed to every person, no matter the place, no matter the time, the context, or the or who they are. And so it's a really important kind of a philosophical foundational perspective on how policy should be designed. But we don't design policy this way. And so we've been attempting to do this time and again the Civil Rights Movement understood you can't have civil rights unless you eliminate the problem of economic insecurity. It's a key tool of racial subjugation. 

1つ目は雇用の保障、2つ目は所得の保障です。 したがって、私たちは彼の政権中に両方の面でかなりの努力をしましたが、大規模な失業問題に対処するには十分ではありませんでした。 そして、政策の観点から見た問題は、これらが一時的な措置であったということです。 私たちは最終的に、所得支援を主に優先する一種の制度、公的制度、福祉制度を作り上げましたが、雇用支援と雇用の安定が世界人類宣言で再び明確にされた重要な部分であることを忘れています。 権利。その後、国際社会はこれが基本的で譲ることのできない権利であると理解しました。 人々は仕事にアクセスできるべきであり、良い行動に対する報酬としてではなく、今日私たちが一般的に考えるような、生産性が高いからでも、正しいことをしたからでもなく、他の一連の経済的利益とともに、雇用への権利を有するべきである。 社会的、政治的権利は譲渡することができず、場所、時間、状況、人物に関係なく、すべての人に保証されるべきです。 したがって、これは政策をどのように設計すべきかについての非常に重要な種類の哲学的基礎的な視点です。 しかし、私たちはこのようにポリシーを設計しません。 そこで私たちは、経済不安の問題を解消しない限り公民権は得られないということを公民権運動は理解しているということを何度も繰り返し試みてきました。 それは人種的な服従の重要なツールです。

It has to be part of the agenda. And so the Green New Deal, again, inserted and I think that's why the Green New Deal was so effective in capturing people's imagination, because they understood that climate and jobs are not foes, that we can we can provide for both and so today we are having another kind of revival of the job guarantee idea. I think that, at least in my work, I try to emphasize the structural benefits of the job guarantee and the macroeconomic benefits and why the job creator really is an alternative to the NAIRU problem. Because we haven't had a moral statement of why jobs are necessary, but we are now also having kind of an economic statement that this is good policy, this is a good economic model. And so for our viewers and listeners, the slide that you just saw, which I thought was excellent, our producer, Mike and I actually pulled that from a lecture that Professor Tcherneva gave at the Watson Institute at Brown University, which also happens to be where Ka went to school, so Ka’s alma mater. So everything is connected. But on that note, let's talk a bit about the job guarantee. 


Yeah, let's just start with the basics. What is the job guarantee? It's a policy, a public policy that says if you need work, we will guarantee it. Come to employment office and you're seeking decent employment. You know what we might call a basic job that provides essential living wage, living wages and benefits, then that will be provided through the public sector. No ifs, ands or buts, not conditional on whether you have done X, Y, and Z. It is it's just a public option, if you will. It's a public employment opportunity that is direct. The projects are created in the community and people can then apply and take up those local jobs because it's a public employment opportunity. It also is proposed to serve the public purpose, right? We're not competing with Ford and producing cars or, you know, tires or whatever. We are addressing essential problems in the community. Care needs, environmental needs, work that is typically under provisioned, too anyhow. So the job guarantee has this dual objective of providing employment for those who need and producing something of social value for the community. It's a jobs program, but it does have some import and structural features. If that were open ended, if the program were universal, if it were implemented in every corner of the country, then it will have some profound impacts, I think, on the labor market and the way the economy works. I want to actually get into some case studies. Has anyone tried this before? Maybe cases outside of the United States that we can point to? Yes. I mean, we I already talked a little bit about the New Deal of the thirties that had such a huge range of projects for the unemployed. And they were both creative projects, art projects. They were history projects. They were projects for musicians as well as infrastructure projects. Now, I want to say that especially the Civilian Conservation Corps was so, so popular with people that they considered it really to be their right, that the government did owe them a job. But the program was not reauthorized. So when you look around the world, typically there are large and small programs, but they tend to be temporary. Usually they're put in place in the middle of a crisis. We can think of the Argentina Plan Jefe as you have this program that was implemented as a direct employment program to deal with the crisis of 2001. We have projects that are ... the employment stimulus in South Africa. That was a direct employment program to deal with the unemployment problem that stemmed from COVID. These are large scale. There are smaller programs and they target particular groups. So in the UK, actually in many, many countries there are direct employment programs for the youth, but they are very small, really, really small. They're very effective and seem to have good results. But they again, temporary and they're not at the scale to address the youth unemployment problem in Europe. There are programs that specifically target the long term unemployed. As I said, there are major scarring effects and once you are unemployed, it's actually the longer you stay unemployed, the harder it is to get back into the labor market in addition to the other problems that I explained. So in Europe, there are some very interesting and notable experiments called the Zero Long-Term Unemployment areas (TZCLD) that was launched in France with a reasonable success, so much so that the program was expanded, a budget was appropriated for it at the national level, and it now covers most regions in France. However, again, it needs to be scaled up to address the problem of unemployment. Here we are targeting only the long term unemployed. Austria has a really interesting, similar program for the long term unemployed, the one program that I want to single out, the permanent program is in India, and that's the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. This is the only program, to my knowledge, that is implemented as a matter of a basic human right. It doesn't guarantee open ended universal access to everyone. It's only for rural households and it only guarantees 100 days of work. But you don't have to be unemployed to access it. It is guaranteed as a basic human right. You can avail it yourself no matter your circumstance. So it's a very interesting program because it is very large. It covers I mean, India is a big country, but it covers around 30% of all rural households. So it's interesting to see how very poor regions are actually able to create employment opportunities to see the impact and to do this on a regular basis because the program is not temporary. If you're entitled by law to it. So there are challenges there. And no doubt, in this kind of neo liberal paradigm, the fastest way to undermine a program is to underfund it. And India's definitely suffering from that. Nevertheless, it's interesting because it has provided a critical lifeline and people are demanding more. They're asking for 200 days. They are asking for expansion to rural areas. They're asking for, again, creating projects and specifically targeting youth, etc.. So there are other very interesting programs that marry the direct employment approach with some other problem. Ethiopia, for example, uses the direct employment approach to deal with droughts, with food insecurity, etc.. So I think that if we look, we will find some good case studies that teach us what a job guarantee might look like and what some of the effects are. But this is still, I would say, a non-conventional approach. You know, typically policymakers don't think of providing a job to a person who needs a job. And it is paradoxical because we tend to think about direct provisioning for so many things, maybe not in the US, but if you don't have retirement income, we guarantee Social Security, right? We provide retirement income, right? If you don't have food, we guarantee access to food. But if you don't have a job, we do not guarantee employment. We provide a little bit of income and send you on your way. We might provide a little bit of training for jobs that are not there. And so the direct employment approach, I think is prime for taking center stage and for reconsideration as a key policy for full employment. Well, and price stability and economic security and environmental renewal, you name it. 


So here in the United States, we now have a congressional resolution put forward by Rep. Ayanna Pressley that calls for a job guarantee program. And that has come about from your work, from the work of groups like Policy Link and the Modern Monetary Theory community in general. Can we now kind of break down what a United States based job guarantee policy would look like? Because what I find really important and special about it is that it is, in my opinion, at least, and I think all of us, right: the heart of the Green New Deal in many ways and part of a big part of the just transition component of the Green New Deal. And so we have a slide, an image that looks at the three job guarantees in the Green New Deal, three ways that a job guarantee is enacted and put forward. Can you kind of break down what this speaks to? Yes. I mean, you know, the Green New Deal is really a vision of what a good might look like. It's not just a proposal for a technical solution to a climate question. It says, what is that economy that we want to inherit that not only stabilizes temperatures, but also stabilizes livelihoods. And the job guarantees that key piece in there. Now, there are, in my view, three different job guarantees in this vision. The first one is kind of the mass mobilization approach. There is little time. There are urgent climate crises that are a battle barreling throughout the globe. We see them every day, right? We need to address them. Hurricane after hurricane, fire after fire, flood after floods. Who picks up the pieces? Right. We need to be able not only to address these crises and that takes jobs. So that takes employment, direct employment, mass, large scale employment. But we also need to change our infrastructure so that we prevent these crises. So the all hands on deck, this kind of industrial mobilization that guarantees everyone participation, I'm thinking about more kind of like wartime mobilization where every company, household skill level, people are participating in a comprehensive plan for transitioning the economy, the grid, the infrastructure and agriculture, etc.. So really thinking about the way we fought the war, World War Two. So that's the kind of mobilization that might be required. But then what we didn't do and we laid on our laurels in the United States after World War Two and we secured full employment. We thought that would last, but it didn't last. As soon as we transition to a peacetime economy, unemployment returned because we didn't have the employment and safety net that the New Deal projects provided. So that the second piece of the Green New Deal is that there will be a job guarantee there that will provide safety net in these two dimensions for people who have toiled in the fossil fuel industries, they will have income support, they will be guaranteed good retirement, but they can also be guaranteed a job if they so desire in the green economy. And we see this because I talked to people, the Appalachian communities, that have been decimated by mining, and they understand how important the Green New Deal is to them and their livelihood and transitioning their communities, filling up the mines, making manmade lakes or whatever, reforest, doing reforestation, restoring their ecosystems. So that is both a safety net for the people who have been working maybe the most vulnerable, but also who can restore their communities. And then the second piece is that this is just an employment safety net for, as I said, anyone, whatever their circumstance, perhaps you've lost the job due to automation. Perhaps you will have stepped out of the labor market for caregiving responsibilities. Whatever the reason, there will be a public option for you. And then the beauty of this program is that it actually stabilizes the all of us experience this economy like we know we understand this. You don't have to be an economist to understand that we go through these ups and downs and sometimes are better and sometimes a worse. And that creates a lot of instability. This shuttering of businesses and layoffs and returning of jobs. The job guarantee by virtue of being there, providing employment in every community, actually stabilizes those communities. And we don't see this huge kind of yo yo of businesses coming and going. If you look at economies that have attempted to secure full employment, they're far more stable than our economy. They don't see this big volatility in the unemployment rate. So what what I'm suggesting is that our recessions are not going to be as deep. Our booms are not going to be potentially as speculative, although, listen, we've got to do other things to address speculative booms. But in general, at least, people will not be victims of speculation when they lose their jobs because somebody is speculating in the housing market. They will always be secured. Unemployment, a good living wage, employment opportunity. One of the things I love about the idea also is that it creates this new anchor. I have heard before, right? People say the minimum wage when there's unemployment around is not whatever we set it to seven, ten, 15, it's zero. Because when you're unemployed you don't have an income. And so I really appreciate and think it's very powerful the way the job guarantee sets a wage floor at whatever, you know, we politically and democratically decide it should be the living wage. And I feel like that is a very powerful kind of leverage for workers and the labor movement in general. Yeah, this is really such an important point that you're making because, we might have tomorrow kind of a very progressive president, great administration. And they say, okay, we are raising the minimum wage and we have Congress behind us and we're going to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Great. But if you don't have a job, what good is it to you And really, it's important to appreciate how the lives of people who are employed are affected by those who are not employed. Then whatever progress we eke out on our jobs, on the job front, it's always under jeopardy because you could always lose the job or somebody might be willing to take the job without those benefits that we fought for. We see this slide on over the postwar period. We've seen this happen, the erosion of the good, stable job with a public option that guarantees employment at some basic wage, that provides an entirely different dynamic in the labor market. That means that if somebody wishes to offer you $7 an hour, they won't really be able to because you always have the 15 $20 option. If a an employer wants to harass you or take away your benefits, you can walk away. You can say no. And so it is really a structural kind of support that says, well, this is what we think has to be the basic job and it should be accessible to all and let the marketplace sort out the rest of the jobs in the economy. That is a very effective way of eliminating poverty, jobs. Right. It creates the so coveted competition, right, for the marketplace. So the bad employers are either driven out of business or they're incentivized to do better. So what I'm saying is law is not enough. You have to also have access to employment to be able to secure the floor and to be able to guarantee those benefits. I mean, you can think of it also as a as another tool to achieving other objectives. If the public option gives you Medicare, then employers that do not provide health care will have to think twice if they if they want you on the job. And they might again be urged to offer health care as well. So there are multiple benefits to to securing kind of a guaranteed, you know, public employment opportunity. All right. So to kind of wrap this up, in a sense, we've got to come full circle here and bring up a tweet by our nemesis here at Funny Money. And I want to speak to to this because there was a claim made that, historically speaking, you needed to have or it was important to have balanced budgets in order to keep the unemployment rate low. What's the problem with this framing in this argument? Look, these are two unrelated things. The unemployment rate can be very high with low deficit or vice versa. What we do know is, of course, when you have high unemployment, the public sector has to respond, Right? When you have high unemployment, you have lost incomes, you have lost tax revenue. The public sector, well, we have institutions that address or at least attempt to address the poverty that comes from unemployment. So they kick in automatically. Right. So there is there is some kind of a relationship, if you will, between government spending and large unemployment. But the point here is that the deficit is not a measure of well-being. It's not it should not be a target of policy. It's usually a reflection of something that's happening in the economy. And you may have very high unemployment. And you can have very low, low deficit, which is the case in Europe. And it's structurally they have decided that they have they should have these deficit rules and they have tied their hands and they're cutting their budgets and they have mass unemployment. So this is not a particularly useful way of thinking about either the deficit or the unemployment problem. One of the ways that I've heard this talked about before is to move away from this idea that we need sound finance in order to accomplish our goals in the macro economy, which really means like, what's happening to people's lives. The other way I've heard it talked about and I think this is a central component of the modern money paradigm, is to talk about functional finance, which is to say what are we trying to accomplish in the economy? It's not about what our budget or our deficit looks like, but it's actual like the real social health and environmental consequences that we can develop or foster in our economy, in real communities. Yeah, the deficit myth, you know, balancing the budget, whatever conventionally is understood as fiscal responsibility. I call fiscal irresponsibility. These are basically the the primary obstacles to achieving policy objectives. They hold policy hostage because they divert attention from the real problems. Do we have mass unemployment? Do we have large social costs? Do we have the real resources to address the Green New Deal objectives? Those are the real questions. Do we have inequality? Do we have opportunity? But the answer to these questions is always subjected to this litmus test is whether we have money and we have to put that to rest, because I don't know how many more teachable moments we need. We've had the financial crisis. We had COVID. We have endless wars, and we see that budgets and financial resources, money is mobilized on short order, no questions asked. Whenever whatever the policy priority is, it's never a question of whether we have the money. Yes, we do have the money and the size of the deficit has never been an obstacle to pursuing these objectives. And so at the same the same sort of thing has to happen with the Green New Deal, with jobs, with housing, with infrastructure. We need to be looking at what is the goal and to achieve it in terms of its real resources, finances, just a tool it enables our achieving our goals. And it is readily available as these crises amply demonstrate. Now that all of our listeners are just hungry for more of your work. Professor Tcherneva, I want to remind everyone that The Case For a Job Guarantee is a brilliant book that you should definitely get and read. Thank you so much for being with us, Professor Tcherneva, and breaking this down. Do you want to share anything about work you've got going on or other ways to follow what you have coming down the pike? Well, thanks. This is great conversation. I am, well, happily going on a sabbatical, but I have a new project called the Economic Democracy Initiative, which is creating a lot of curricular and research projects. So I would say definitely stay tuned. Follow me on Twitter and hopefully there'll be some new things coming up to share. Amazing. Very excited to check out the Economic Democracy Initiative. Also very, very exciting to share is that the job guarantee work is now going to be featured in a special report, U.N. report, to be released at the end of June. I was very happy to help with that report and will be participating in the launch. The reason why I think it's very exciting is because we are coming full circle to that conversation we began almost 100 years ago of how do we secure this basic human right? And with the report, I hope that countries will then well, they will have to respond and perhaps will take the moment to reflect on this new policy tool that, as I said, is under underappreciated and under utilized. Thank you.



0:02Welcome back to Funny Money. This is the podcast about the economy, how it works and how it can work better.
0:08And today we're talking about jobs. That's right. We have a great episode for you because
0:13last time, if you remember, we talked about the Green New Deal, but we didn't go that much into depth about
0:18one of its most important parts, and that is the federal job guarantee. The way the economy
0:23works right now is we intentionally keep a bunch of people out of a job, and it doesn't need to be that way. And we have
0:29the best person to explain why and how: Pavlina Tcherneva. This is going to change the way everyone
0:34thinks about the economy and the world. I think so. I agree. I agree with that. This is a big one. So without
0:39further ado, Pavlina Tcherneva is a full professor of economics at Bard College, the director
0:45of the Open Society University Networks, Economic Democracy Initiative and a research
0:50scholar at the Levy Economics Institute. She specializes in modern money and public policy. Pavlina,
0:56what an honor. Thank you for being with us. Hello. Hello. Very nice to be here. I hope we can
1:01meet the expectations. Yes. We're so happy to have you on. We're going to get
1:06right into it because people need to eat dinner and that's very important. But people
1:12can't afford to eat dinner if they don't have good paying jobs. And that is the topic of
1:17a lot of what we'll be discussing today. And I think it's really important because we
1:22all have these ideas based on what they see on the news. And if people bother to tune
1:27in to congressional hearings or what the Federal Reserve is saying. But we hear a lot of narratives
1:33about employment and unemployment. So one of the first things
1:38we hear is we get these jobs reports. People talk about what the unemployment
1:43numbers are. So we're really interested to hear 

how do we currently measure
1:49unemployment

 and feel free to tackle some of what you don't like about the way we do
1:55it currently. Yeah, that's right. When people hear the unemployment
2:00numbers ... today we hear that they're very low, historically low. We're at full employment or
2:06something called over full employment or whatever that means. But basically,
2:11we have a statistical agency that tries to assess who's looking for work
2:17and they have a pretty narrow definition. They sample
2:2350,000 people and then they extrapolate for the population as a whole.
2:28And then they ask them, are you employed? And, person may say no,
2:34and then they will inquire, why not? And if the person says that they have not
2:39been able to find work, they will also ask them: well, did you look and how long ago
2:44did you look? So the bottom line is, if you have been looking for work in the last four weeks and you have not
2:50successfully found a job, you will be counted as officially unemployed.
2:55But if you have been looking for three months, for six months, for a year,
3:02but not in the last four weeks, you actually will not be counted. And if you have
3:08been discouraged altogether and stopped looking, you also won't be counted.
3:14So there are some of these very basic fundamentals that we have a very, very narrow definition of who's active.
3:20And by that we mean who's actively looking. But if we are really asking
3:25the question, how many people need jobs, we really need to be looking at
3:31much broader, more expanded definitions. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics
3:36has alternative measures. It does have more expanded definitions, which
3:41you don't hear about in the news. And those definitions recognize that
3:47some people may not have been able to look for the last month. So they will include people
3:52who have been looking for the last year or the previous year. Some of these definitions
3:58will also include people who are discouraged or they say that they just don't see any prospects,
4:03and that's why they've stopped looking. But they might also include people who are
4:09working only part time, which is also another interesting statistical artifact.
4:14You can be counted as employed even if you worked one hour in the previous week.
4:22And so you might be looking for more than one hour, right? You might be looking for a full time
4:27job. So we have this category called part time for economic
4:32reasons, meaning you can't find full time work. So the Bureau of Labor Statistics will have some expanded
4:38definitions. And if you look at them normally,
4:44you would find that about twice as many people are in need of work
4:49according to these statistics. But even that is, I think,
4:54kind of the of the baseline, the most
5:01I would say narrow way of looking at how many people need work
5:06because there are just so many folks who would take a job
5:12if one were provided. 


And we see this in another kind of
5:17statistical measure, and that is when we try to look at who's getting jobs,
5:23whenever people find employment, we're trying to say to ask the question, well, who are those
5:29folks? And many of them come from outside of the labor market. They're not captured by any of
5:34these measures that I just explained. So out there is some kind of
5:39hidden demand for work, a lot of it comes from caregivers,
5:46people who might say, well, no, I don't need a job because I have one at home. I'm taking
5:51care of children, I'm taking care of elderly parents. But if a good job comes
5:56along that can afford the family to take care of
6:02the elderly or the children and work, then they might take the employment opportunity. And then
6:07there would be others who don't report as being unemployed but might take employment.
6:12So there are lots of statistical artifacts. I
6:17particularly like to look at unemployment at a kind of a regional level, to look at
6:23every corner of the country, to see what's happening in the backyard, in your neighborhood, in a remote,
6:28rural or even metropolitan area, because the national
6:34statistics just don't capture these huge
6:39disparities. I mean, right now we're looking at 3.5% unemployment rates. But when you
6:44look at the West Coast, if you look at the Deep South, if you look at
6:51the Rust Belt, we have communities, towns that have unemployment rates
6:56double digit. And that is not just today. That is on a good day.
7:02That is in a bad day, that is just permanent high level of unemployment. So there are
7:09these statistics, official statistics we just described how poorly they capture the actual need for jobs.
7:15But if you look at the official statistics at the local level, you will find that on
7:20on a good day, there are communities that have double digit unemployment rates.
7:26And if you then break it down by group, say, young people, by race
7:31by age, you'll find that those levels are also much higher. So, no,
7:36I don't like to look at the national statistics. That's a baseline scenario. You want to take a look
7:41at what the official numbers are saying. But you got to look deeper to get a sense
7:47of what we're really talking about. I think it puts us in a really precarious position
7:53when we want to make an assessment about the health of our economy. And we talk a lot
7:58about the real economy here, because when you even have these figures supposedly
8:03measuring unemployment that aren't actually capturing what our productive capacity is
8:08when it comes to labor and who can actually work and who is working and who is not, it really
8:13makes it difficult to understand how there could possibly be this trade off
8:19between unemployed and inflation that they talk about so much. People hear Jerome Powell
8:25and talking heads say all the time these days that inflation is really bad for working people
8:30because our grocery bills are higher, energy bills are higher. And we feel that weight.
8:35And I'm just so sorry, but the trade off that needs to happen is more of you need to be unemployed
8:40to get these prices down so that we have balance in the economy because the labor market is hot.
8:46Can you say some more about this supposed,
8:51perhaps-make-believe-not-demonstrated-in-the-data tradeoff between unemployment and inflation?
8:57Yeah. This is such an important article of faith that economists have that there is
9:03some kind of law, regularity,
9:08economic rules that says that there is. Well, you can have the best of
9:14both worlds. You know, you can either have really, really tight labor market, low unemployment,
9:19good jobs, well-paying jobs, or you can have stable prices.
9:25And at some point, if you get way too many jobs that pay really good wages,
9:31God forbid people will spend those wages on production, on goods services, and they will
9:36then bid up those prices. You know, you go to the grocery store, too many of us go there
9:42and then all of a sudden the price of avocados goes up and voila, we have inflation
9:47and today people are experiencing inflation. And it's not because there are too many jobs
9:53or well-paying jobs. That's one thing we didn't say in the first
9:58segment that we're talking about, people who don't have jobs. But there are many, many people who have jobs
10:04that are very poorly paid, jobs that are precarious, jobs, unstable jobs.
10:09Those are part of the official employment numbers that show that we have a good economy.
10:15But it's not so good, actually. So we are experiencing inflation
10:21and we could get into what it is caused by, but certainly not because there
10:26is strong spending and strong income and labor markets.
10:31But the policymakers are looking at prices going up
10:36and energy prices, of stuff, of services, etc.,
10:41and are saying, well, what are we going to do about this? This this takes a bite out of the purchasing
10:46power of every person. We need to make sure to stay that we can stabilize
10:52those prices. And what is their solution? Soften the labor market. And that's just jargon
10:58for create more unemployment, eliminate some jobs,
11:03diminish some of this purchasing power, even though the Federal Reserve recognizes
11:09explicitly that that inflation is not
11:15a cause of strong labor market, that jobs are not creating
11:20those inflationary pressures. So that's why I say that this is an article
11:26of faith that in economic theory there is this trade off known as the Phillips curve
11:32or as the more fancy name today that we use as the NAIRU, the non accelerating
11:37inflation rate of unemployment. And then that somehow is this like
11:44ideal case of unemployment where we might have stable prices.
11:50And so the policymakers are searching for this number, for this magical number
11:55that's going to secure stable prices. And you will hear,
12:01you know, pundits, economists, mainstream economists, the Fed say, well, we might need to have
12:06elevated levels of unemployment for a few years in order to bring prices down.
12:12All of this is just based on bad economics. It is not empirically supported.
12:17Only two years ago, the very same Fed was questioning this very concept.
12:24Jerome Powell under oath was saying, well, this NAIRU relationship seems to have broken down,
12:30but we need to figure out what this relationship is, because the policymaker doesn't have another way of thinking
12:36about how to fight inflation. And so the primary tool is job losses.


12:43I'm reminded of Coretta Scott King's famous quote,
12:49because she was a big champion of the job guarantee, and she argued that only the unemployed
12:54are called upon to be sacrificial lambs on the altar of fighting inflation.
13:02So I think we have a broken economic paradigm. The profession
13:08hasn't really thought of another way of dealing with prices except
13:14by creating more unemployment. And I think that we I reject
13:20that outright and I think that we can create guaranteed employment,
13:26at least secure a basic job for anyone who needs it without creating inflationary pressures.
13:32So when I talk about this, I often say, well, the motivation
13:37for them doing this is there are a lot of people in power that are quite happy
13:43when wages are low and benefits are low and workers are not competing for the same job.
13:48So employers, they want it so many workers are competing for
13:53the same job so that they're willing to take a little bit less than what their labor is worth. Oftentimes
13:58a lot less than their labor is worth. So that profit margins are high. And a lot of times they say you just sound
14:03like you really hate corporate America, right? You sound like a raging commie. That's not how it works, but it's often
14:09reflected in the data that this relationship is not there. It's something that Jerome Powell has said
14:15on the floor of Congress, that this relationship really isn't as strong as it used
14:20to be. He said this, and then went on to
14:25a period of interest rate hikes, month over month with this explanation that this is
14:30why he's doing it. The exact logic he argued against on the floor of Congress just three years ago.
14:36So we have a chart that's showing what the natural rate of unemployment,
14:41which is something that's said a lot, basically the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment that you
14:46just described, where they predict we expect if unemployment is at this level, inflation will be
14:52relatively stable. So I guess my question is, have there been periods where
14:57unemployment was high, but inflation was not?
15:02Yes, lots of them. We can leave that chart up. And being helpful.
15:07We have had periods where unemployment was very, very low
15:13and inflation was very, very low. I mean, the nineties was an
15:19example of that. We had again 3.5%, which was
15:24lower than what we had seen in the previous four decades. No inflation
15:30in sight. In fact, we haven't had really any substantive inflation
15:35since the oil shock of the seventies. We really worried
15:40and that's what the Fed worries more about. It's deflation. After the great financial crisis,
15:46when we had mass unemployment and a global kind of collapse of the financial
15:51system of production, we had,
15:57you know, zero inflation negative inflation. Japan is
16:03a classic case of a country that has been flirting with deflation,
16:08which means prices are coming down. And you might think this is a good thing, but it's not really a
16:13great thing. So the reason why I say that the Fed is afraid of deflation far more than inflation
16:18is because what that means is people are selling stuff, they're selling their inventories, they might be selling
16:24their houses, incomes are falling, profits are falling. So when you have deflation, you just have
16:29a general rise, kind of a decline in the value of things. And that's not
16:34a good thing. You want to have a little bit of inflation. So the Fed has been trying to engineer
16:39that little bit of inflation after the great financial crisis without much luck.
16:45Okay. And we then entered this kind of unusual period in the
16:50recovery post pandemic. And we started seeing inflation coming from the various bottlenecks, from the
16:55disruptions, the logistical issues around shipping and restarting
17:01the supply chain. There's energy; energy
17:09costs increases as a result of the war in Ukraine and various other factors.
17:14But these are all on the cost side. And I think there's a general consensus that inflation is coming
17:20from these disruptions. And corporate America is also taking advantage of this moment
17:26and increasing their profit margins. So it's not that the Fed engineered inflation. They've been trying to
17:31do this since 2008. They were unsuccessful. We are seeing inflation
17:36because the pandemic engineered it because of the disruptions and because firms are
17:42taking advantage of this moment to raise their prices. So it's not the Fed. But what is the Fed
17:47charged with? They're charged with securing stable prices. But I should
17:53also say the Fed in the United States has a dual mandate. They're supposed to secure
17:58a maximum employment and stable prices. It used to be full employment
18:03and price stability. Now, not all central banks have the same kind of mandate. So
18:08when you think back to the trade off, the Fed is supposed to give us both stable prices
18:14and full employment, but it has to choose because it believes it has a trade off.
18:21Currently the Fed is facing inflation. So what are they going to do? They're going to use unemployment
18:26to tame these wage increases that come not from the labor market. So it's
18:31a real problem because they are not able to engineer inflation, they're not able to tame it.
18:38I mean, they've been increasing interest rates for a year and inflation is coming down
18:43on its own. Whether or not they had raised interest rates, inflation would have come down
18:48because we're working through these bottlenecks and these logistical problems. So the Fed
18:54is actually quite impotent in managing the economy or making
18:59creating what they are hoping is the soft landing. What the Fed can do is they can
19:04break things so they can increase interest rates to such level
19:09that things start falling apart. People can't afford their mortgages. The small business owner
19:15cannot get a loan to pay the wage bill. And then we have like business shutdowns.
19:21So we are teetering towards that moment where they actually going to create
19:26quite a lot of unemployment if they continue this aggressive interest rate
19:32increases. And for those of you who are watching this live and saw the chart,
19:37you would notice that when unemployment increases, it doesn't just tick up.
19:43It doesn't just slowly go up, it shoots up, it accelerates.
19:48So that's what I mean by the Fed breaks things when it's the Fed's role. But in many cases
19:55it is other causes for the recession, whether it's the financial crisis,
20:01whether it is a housing crash, whether it is some other. In the nineties
20:06it was the surplus. So there are various reasons why we enter recessions. But the Fed
20:12has far less power to give us a Goldilocks economy than most people believe.
20:18All right. To everyone's displeasure, I'm introducing a new character to our story, a character named Jason
20:24Furman. If you haven't heard of Jason Furman, he was appointed by Barack Obama to be the chair
20:30of the Council of Economic Advisors and then also for the National Economic Council, where he was
20:36a deputy there. He just so happens to be the heir to a real estate and shopping
20:41center tycoon. Let's watch this video of this villain in our story. 


What do you think
20:46the unemployment rate needs to look like in the United States to become, quote, “stable”?
20:51I don't know. Look, if you want to get inflation to 2.0, I think you need an unemployment rate in the sixes.
20:56In the sixes if you want to get to 2.0. Okay. That's that's a that's a massive shift
21:02from where we are today. I don't think we need to be at 2.0, though. I think if the Fed gets to 2.99,
21:07okay, but to get to 2.99, so we need to be at 4.5. Do we need
21:12to be at four? What is it? What is that in your mind? I would guess around 4.5 to 5
21:17and these things are super hard to contain. Is that politically palatable? And that's why we have central banks
21:23has to make tough choices. So what kind of model do we think
21:28Jason Furman is just running in his head there to spin out these numbers like this? It's really impressive.
21:33The computing power in his brain. What kind of data is he taking in and putting back up?
21:39Can you just say a little bit about, what's with hiking interest rates to throw people out of work?
21:44What do you make of what Furman said there? Well, I mean, listen, it's not like he's volunteering
21:49himself to lose his job so we can tame inflation. It's always
21:55other people's jobs. Look, what's the model? Highly undemocratic,
22:01right? That's what he's saying. He's saying, thank goodness we have somebody who's not really accountable to the public
22:07to make the tough choices, to create enough unemployment, to fight inflation,
22:13because, number one, there is a broken theoretic model unverified by
22:18my statistical data, but it's the only thing they've got. And so they
22:23are turning to this kind of draconian tool
22:29of throwing people out of work to deal with inflation. It is just so
22:35morally bankrupt in addition to being just not good science. I mean, I'll
22:41give you many examples. After the great financial crisis, official reports
22:46that the European Commission were putting the natural rate of unemployment in Spain at 26%.
22:53So they're basically saying this is the most that the economy can create, and that is the
22:58unemployment rate that is consistent with stable prices. What kind of economic model is that to
23:04consider this to be unacceptable scenario? In the nineties
23:09we saw the same story play out. We came from
23:14the eighties in the early nineties, a very high level of unemployment and the unemployment
23:20level kept coming down and the early nineties, mid nineties and the Goldilocks breaking
23:25through every estimate of the NAIRU that was out there put forward by professional
23:30economists like Furman. I mean I don't know if he was actually one of them, but that was
23:35basically the profession. That's what central bankers were saying. The natural rate is 12%.
23:41No, no, no. The natural rate is 7%. And that unemployment rate keeps falling. No, no. The natural
23:46rate is 5%. So we can't these numbers can't be trusted. We need to really put
23:51this aside and start asking the hard questions. How can we make sure
23:57that people have good and stable jobs? And if there is inflation, how can we
24:02secure stable prices without throwing people out of work? I mean, you began the segment with what's
24:08a healthy Economy? And one of the most fundamental building blocks of a healthy economy
24:13are good, stable jobs. We can't have a model in which people are
24:18laid off, hired, fired, hired, fired, according to
24:23whatever the whims of market activity or changes in growth. I mean,
24:28we need to have some kind of sense of economic security and one of
24:34the fundamental prerequisites of economic security is having a good and stable job.
24:39But we don't have that, which is your chart shows us so, so clearly, because in the United States,
24:45unemployment is a huge yo yo. It goes up, it comes down. And again, this is just the official data.
24:50Behind the curtain, there are millions and millions and millions who are looking for work,
24:55would like to have work, but they don't have that access.
25:02Professor Tcherneva, you brought up avocados and it just reminds me of all of
25:07these articles that are written about how millennials are pushing up the prices on avocados.
25:13And I can tell you that we probably are. Just kidding. I think we need a Green New Deal for Avocados. But in
25:19truth, though, so many people that struggle with unemployment are young
25:25people. And that's kind of like something that that we see very often.
25:31One of the framings that you have offered in your work about unemployment
25:36is to understand it as an epidemic, as an
25:42infectious disease that starts to grow rapidly.
25:47We actually have a video that shows changes in the employment rate and
25:53changes in unemployment throughout the United States. If you are listening to us on a podcast, make sure you
25:58check it out in our show notes when you have a moment. So let's check out that video.
26:27Can you tell us a little bit about why you use that video in many of your lectures and what some of
26:33the insights are about these changes in unemployment? They don't affect
26:38everybody equally, right? Are there particular communities that are hit harder by by the
26:44phenomenon of unemployment? Yeah. This animated map of unemployment
26:49across the United States, I think is just really telling. And it provides a new and
26:54different perspective of how to think about the problem. The first thing that we
27:00notice is that there are communities, as I said earlier, that always have
27:05double digit unemployment rates. And some of these communities, we are really talking about 30, 40, 50%
27:10unemployment. But the video also goes through three periods
27:16of recessions in the early nineties, in the early 2000s, and after the great financial crisis.
27:21And what we find is that, well, unemployment
27:26behaves in a very particular way. There are almost, you can say, hot spots
27:32where the mass layoffs take place and then those layoffs ripple
27:38in the form of more layoffs throughout the community. And in a sense, unemployment
27:43kind of spreads from one epicenter to the periphery
27:49and further and further and further. And that is kind of the reliable result of a
27:54downturn of a recession, whatever its causes. And then we wait for the jobs
28:00to return, but they never quite return to the epicenter that is
28:06plagued by high levels of unemployment. And so if
28:12you consider the behavior of unemployment, there is one other
28:17kind of phenomenon that behaves this way, and that's really a viral spread.
28:22Epidemiologists, their models of disease spread and contagion
28:28actually look like this. So it's not just the metaphor,
28:34because this kind of behavior has some very important real consequences.
28:42The unemployment problem has social and human costs that typically
28:47economists don't consider. But you can find them in psychology. You can find them in
28:52studies of public health. I mean, they're intuitive things. You and I understand if you've
28:58seen somebody who's been unemployed for a very long time, you know that probably their mental health is not great,
29:04potentially their physical health, maybe their kids are not doing as well as you can,
29:09take them to the extracurriculars, provide for them. That has a material
29:14impact not just on the unemployed person, but on their family, on their children.
29:21So there are health costs, there are cost to the opportunities
29:27that their children and family members might have. And economists only look to
29:33a scarring effect, which is the lost income that's really not adequate.
29:39Virtually every social problem we can think of is in one way
29:45or another, linked to absence of jobs. And, you know, these communities
29:51that have very little like economic life or economic opportunity
29:56mean that they don't have mom and pop shops, they don't have the kind of businesses or
30:02community services that they need. And so we've talked about the so-called
30:08depths of despair that come with the loss of good, stable employment,
30:13with kind of the gutting out of the middle class and the loss of
30:20important jobs in some of these what used to be good manufacturing centers. So
30:26this map to me kind of explains how unemployment number one
30:31spreads. And again, we're talking only about the official data behind
30:36those numbers. There is perennial economic insecurity, people who are persistently
30:42experiencing these costs of unemployment. So if we were to think about
30:48employment creation or dealing with the problem of unemployment,
30:53I tend to think of it as a as a public health problem that we shouldn't do it
30:59when a crisis hits. We shouldn't be scratching our heads and saying, okay, well, now we have
31:0510% unemployment. What shall we do? Well, let's just send some stimulus, some checks, and maybe
31:10we can just give some contracts, build a bridge That's too late. Thinking about unemployment
31:15in this way to address it when the crisis hits is we've already
31:21incurred the costs, we've already devastated the communities, and then it's jobs return far
31:27more slowly. So I tend to think about the problem in a preventative way. I'd much
31:33rather have kind of infrastructure that creates employment as needed,
31:38wherever it is needed, whoever needs it, young people,
31:44caregivers, people returning to the labor market, that that is an infrastructure that is on
31:49the ready, that provides employment, whatever the circumstance in every community.
31:55And would that would be a way of reversing these kind of perverse
32:00dynamics that we see through in this
32:06movie. So today, I think we're seeing a revival in a sense of really
32:11thinking about and grappling with the problem of unemployment, mostly thanks to your work. And I think
32:16of others like Darrick Hamilton and Sandy Darity. 

But there's been a long history of a fight
32:22for the right to employment and for the idea of something like full employment.
32:28I think we have some slides that that speak to this a bit. Can you take us through
32:33what these key points from this beautiful slide? 

Well, you know,
32:39this is important. The job image is not a new idea. But notice that at
32:44least one of the earliest mentions of securing the right to work is in 1793.
32:51Now, why is that? Like 1793 is well,
32:56it's the time of the first French Revolution, but also
33:01the time when the social relationships changed. Right.
33:07They changed in a way where people become far more dependent on markets
33:13and on wage work for their livelihoods. So,
33:20landed peasants have access to the resources to well, you know, I'm not selling
33:26landed peasantry or feudalism as a good economic model. But what I'm saying is that that was
33:32a fundamental transformation. So people need to read The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi to appreciate
33:38what a radical transformation of life that was to be removed from the land
33:43and to be able to to provide for yourself through wage work or not
33:48be able to provide for yourself through wage work. And so some of the early calls for the right
33:54to employment come then, when people realize how essential a job is to
34:00one's existence, and then fast forward,
34:05we have the industrial revolution, we have the emergence of the market economy rapidly
34:11evolving and rapidly changing highly unstable depression, depression, depression, depression. Just read
34:17Charles Dickens. That's the world of the 1800s of poverty,
34:22misery, Yes, opportunity, growth, things unseen. But as well
34:29as massive economic insecurity. And so yet again, the international
34:34community starts thinking, how shall we provide for this most basic,
34:40essential right as as it is understood. So in the
34:46United States, we had this conversation in the context of the Great Depression.
34:51Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a commission in the thirties
34:58to address the problems of unemployment, and that was front and center in his agenda.
35:03As we know, he created directly many, many jobs and many works projects.
35:09But the philosophy that guided this policy approach was that, first,
35:14economic security is fundamental for democracy because
35:19people out of work and out of a job hungry and out of a job at the stuff of which dictatorships are made,
35:25right. That was his quote. And he says, okay, well, how do we make sure that people are not out of a job and they're not hungry?
35:30Well, we need to have a two pronged approach. The first one is provide
35:36employment security, and the second is income security.
35:41So we did a fair amount on both fronts during his administration,
35:47but it was not enough to deal with the massive unemployment problem.
35:53And then the problem from a policy perspective is that these were temporary
35:58measures. We ended up with kind of a system,
36:04a public system, welfare system, if you will, that largely prioritizes income support, but
36:11has forgotten that employment support and employment security is a key piece that was
36:17articulated yet again in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where the international community
36:22then understood that this is a fundamental,
36:27inalienable right. People should have access to jobs not as a reward for good
36:33behavior, not because they are productive or they have done the
36:38right things the way we typically think of employment today, but that the right to employment,
36:43along with a series of other economic, social, political rights are inalienable and they are
36:48to be guaranteed to every person, no matter the place, no matter the time,
36:54the context, or the or who they are. And so it's a really
37:00important kind of a philosophical foundational perspective
37:05on how policy should be designed. But we don't design policy this way. And so we've been
37:10attempting to do this time and again the Civil Rights Movement understood you can't have
37:16civil rights unless you eliminate the problem of economic insecurity. It's a key tool of
37:21racial subjugation. It has to be part of the agenda.
37:26And so the Green New Deal, again, inserted and I think that's why the Green New Deal was so
37:31effective in capturing people's imagination,
37:37because they understood that climate and jobs are not foes,
37:43that we can we can provide for both and
37:49so today we are having another kind of revival of the job guarantee idea. I think that,
37:54at least in my work, I try to emphasize the structural benefits of the job guarantee
38:00and the macroeconomic benefits and why the job creator really is an alternative to the NAIRU problem.
38:06Because we haven't had a moral
38:11statement of why jobs are necessary, but we are now
38:16also having kind of an economic statement that this is good policy, this is a good
38:23economic model. And so for our viewers and listeners, the slide that you just saw, which I thought was excellent,
38:28our producer, Mike and I actually pulled that from a lecture that Professor Tcherneva gave at the
38:34Watson Institute at Brown University, which also happens to be where Ka went
38:40to school, so Ka’s alma mater. So everything is connected. But on that
38:45note, let's talk a bit about the job guarantee. Yeah, let's just start with the basics.
38:51What is the job guarantee? It's a policy, a public policy that says
38:58if you need work, we will guarantee it. Come to employment office
39:03and you're seeking decent employment. You know what we might call a basic job
39:09that provides essential living wage,
39:14living wages and benefits, then that will be provided through the public sector.
39:20No ifs, ands or buts, not conditional on whether you have done X, Y, and Z.
39:27It is it's just a public option, if you will. It's a public employment opportunity
39:33that is direct. The projects are created in the community
39:39and people can then apply and take up
39:44those local jobs because it's a public employment opportunity. It also is
39:52proposed to serve the public purpose, right? We're not competing with Ford and producing cars or,
39:59you know, tires or whatever. We are addressing essential problems
40:04in the community. Care needs, environmental needs, work that
40:09is typically under provisioned, too anyhow. So the job guarantee has this dual
40:17objective of providing employment for those who need
40:23and producing something of social value for the community.
40:28It's a jobs program, but it does have some import and
40:33structural features. If that were open ended, if the program were universal,
40:38if it were implemented in every corner of the country, then it will have some profound impacts,
40:44I think, on the labor market and the way the economy works. I want to actually get into
40:49some case studies. Has anyone tried this before? Maybe cases outside of the United States that we can
40:54point to? Yes. I mean, we I already talked a little bit about
41:00the New Deal of the thirties that had such a huge range of projects
41:05for the unemployed. And they were both creative projects, art projects.
41:11They were history projects. They were projects for musicians as well as
41:16infrastructure projects. Now, I want to say that especially the
41:21Civilian Conservation Corps was so, so popular with people that they considered
41:27it really to be their right, that the government did owe them a job.
41:34But the program was not reauthorized. So when you look around
41:39the world, typically there are large and small programs, but they tend
41:44to be temporary. Usually they're put in place in the middle of a crisis.
41:50We can think of the Argentina Plan Jefe as you have this program that was
41:56implemented as a direct employment program to deal with the crisis of 2001.
42:02We have projects that are ... the employment stimulus in South Africa.
42:08That was a direct employment program to deal with the unemployment problem that stemmed
42:13from COVID. These are large scale. There are smaller programs and
42:19they target particular groups. So in the UK, actually in many,
42:24many countries there are direct employment programs for the youth, but they are very small,
42:29really, really small. They're very effective and seem to have good results. But they
42:35again, temporary and they're not at the scale to address the youth unemployment
42:41problem in Europe. There are programs that specifically target the long
42:46term unemployed. As I said, there are major scarring effects and once
42:51you are unemployed, it's actually the longer you stay unemployed, the harder it is to get back into the labor market
42:57in addition to the other problems that I explained. So in Europe, there are some very interesting
43:02and notable experiments called the Zero Long-Term Unemployment
43:08areas (TZCLD) that was launched in France with a reasonable success,
43:13so much so that the program was expanded, a budget was appropriated
43:19for it at the national level, and it now covers
43:24most regions in France. However, again, it needs to
43:29be scaled up to address the problem of unemployment. Here we are targeting only the long term unemployed.
43:34Austria has a really interesting, similar program for the long term unemployed, the one
43:40program that I want to single out, the permanent program is in India, and that's the
43:46National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. This is the only program, to my knowledge,
43:51that is implemented as a matter of a basic human right. It doesn't
43:56guarantee open ended universal access to everyone. It's only for rural
44:02households and it only guarantees 100 days of work. But you don't
44:07have to be unemployed to access it. It is guaranteed as a basic human right. You can avail
44:14it yourself no matter your circumstance. So it's a very interesting
44:19program because it is very large. It covers I mean, India is
44:25a big country, but it covers around 30% of all rural households. So it's
44:30interesting to see how very poor regions are actually
44:35able to create employment opportunities to see the impact and to do this
44:41on a regular basis because the program is not temporary.
44:47If you're entitled by law to it. So there are challenges there. And no doubt,
44:52in this kind of neo liberal paradigm, the fastest way to undermine a program is to underfund it.
44:58And India's definitely suffering from that. Nevertheless,
45:04it's interesting because it has provided a critical lifeline
45:09and people are demanding more. They're asking for 200 days. They are asking for expansion to rural
45:15areas. They're asking for, again, creating projects and specifically targeting
45:21youth, etc.. So there are other very interesting programs
45:26that marry the direct employment approach with some other problem.
45:32Ethiopia, for example, uses the direct employment approach to deal with droughts,
45:37with food insecurity, etc.. So I think that if we look,
45:43we will find some good case studies that teach us
45:48what a job guarantee might look like and what some of the effects are.
45:54But this is still, I would say, a non-conventional approach. You know, typically policymakers
46:00don't think of providing a job to a person who needs a job. And it is
46:05paradoxical because we tend to think about direct provisioning for so many things,
46:12maybe not in the US, but if you don't have retirement income, we guarantee Social Security, right? We provide
46:18retirement income, right? If you don't have food, we guarantee access to food. But
46:23if you don't have a job, we do not guarantee employment. We provide a little bit of income
46:29and send you on your way. We might provide a little bit of training for jobs that are not there.
46:34And so the direct employment approach, I think is prime
46:40for taking center stage and for reconsideration
46:46as a key policy for full employment. Well, and price
46:52stability and economic security and environmental renewal, you name it.

46:57So here in the United States, we now have a congressional resolution put forward
47:02by Rep. Ayanna Pressley that calls for a job guarantee program. And that has
47:08come about from your work, from the work of groups like Policy Link and the Modern Monetary Theory community
47:13in general. Can we now kind of break down what a
47:18United States based job guarantee policy would look like?
47:24Because what I find really important and special about it is that it is, in my opinion,
47:29at least, and I think all of us, right: the heart of the Green New Deal
47:35in many ways and part of a big part of the just transition component of
47:41the Green New Deal. And so we have a slide, an image that looks
47:47at the three job guarantees in the Green New Deal, three ways that a job guarantee
47:53is enacted and put forward. Can you kind of break down what this speaks to?
47:59Yes. I mean, you know, the Green New Deal is really a vision
48:04of what a good might look like. It's not just a proposal for a
48:09technical solution to a climate question. It says, what is that economy
48:14that we want to inherit that not only stabilizes
48:20temperatures, but also stabilizes livelihoods. And the job guarantees that key
48:25piece in there. Now, there are, in my view, three different job guarantees
48:31in this vision. The first one is kind of the mass mobilization
48:36approach. There is little time. There are urgent climate
48:43crises that are a battle barreling throughout the globe. We see them every day,
48:49right? We need to address them. Hurricane after hurricane, fire after fire, flood after floods.
48:55Who picks up the pieces? Right. We need to be able not only to address these crises
49:00and that takes jobs. So that takes employment, direct employment,
49:05mass, large scale employment. But we also need to change our infrastructure
49:11so that we prevent these crises. So the all hands on deck, this kind of
49:16industrial mobilization that guarantees everyone participation, I'm thinking
49:22about more kind of like wartime mobilization where every company,
49:28household skill level, people are participating in a comprehensive
49:34plan for transitioning the economy, the grid, the infrastructure and agriculture,
49:39etc.. So really thinking about the way we fought the war, World War Two.
49:45So that's the kind of mobilization that might be required. But then what we didn't do
49:51and we laid on our laurels in the United States after World War Two and we secured
49:57full employment. We thought that would last, but it didn't last. As soon as we transition to a peacetime
50:02economy, unemployment returned because we didn't have the employment and safety net
50:08that the New Deal projects provided. So that the second piece of the Green
50:13New Deal is that there will be a job guarantee there that will provide safety net
50:19in these two dimensions for people who have toiled in the
50:25fossil fuel industries, they will have income support, they will
50:30be guaranteed good retirement, but they
50:35can also be guaranteed a job if they so desire in the green economy. And we see this
50:41because I talked to people, the Appalachian communities, that have been decimated
50:46by mining, and they understand how important the Green New Deal is to them
50:51and their livelihood and transitioning their communities, filling up the mines,
50:57making manmade lakes or whatever, reforest, doing reforestation, restoring their ecosystems.
51:02So that is both a safety net for the people who have been working
51:07maybe the most vulnerable, but also who can restore their
51:13communities. And then the second piece is that this is just an employment
51:19safety net for, as I said, anyone, whatever their circumstance,
51:24perhaps you've lost the job due to automation. Perhaps you will have stepped out
51:29of the labor market for caregiving responsibilities. Whatever the reason, there will be a public option
51:35for you. And then the beauty of this program is that it actually stabilizes
51:41the all of us experience this economy like we know we understand
51:47this. You don't have to be an economist to understand that we go through these ups and downs and sometimes are better
51:52and sometimes a worse. And that creates a lot of instability. This
51:58shuttering of businesses and layoffs and returning of jobs. The job
52:04guarantee by virtue of being there, providing employment in every community,
52:09actually stabilizes those communities. And we don't see this
52:14huge kind of yo yo of businesses coming and going. If you look
52:20at economies that have attempted to secure full employment, they're far more stable
52:25than our economy. They don't see this big volatility in the unemployment
52:30rate. So what what I'm suggesting is that our recessions are not going to be as deep.
52:36Our booms are not going to be potentially as speculative, although, listen,
52:41we've got to do other things to address speculative booms. But in general, at least, people will
52:47not be victims of speculation when they lose their jobs because somebody
52:52is speculating in the housing market. They will always be secured. Unemployment, a good
52:58living wage, employment opportunity. One of the things I love about the idea also is
53:04that it creates this new anchor. I have heard before, right?
53:09People say the minimum wage when there's unemployment around is not whatever we set it
53:14to seven, ten, 15, it's zero. Because when you're unemployed you don't have an income.
53:20And so I really appreciate and think it's very powerful the way the job guarantee sets
53:26a wage floor at whatever, you know, we politically and democratically
53:32decide it should be the living wage. And
53:37I feel like that is a very powerful kind of leverage for workers
53:42and the labor movement in general. Yeah, this is really such
53:48an important point that you're making because, we might have tomorrow kind of
53:53a very progressive president, great administration. And they say, okay, we are raising
53:58the minimum wage and we have Congress behind us and we're going to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.
54:05Great. But if you don't have a job, what good is it to you And really,
54:12it's important to appreciate how the lives of people who are employed are affected
54:18by those who are not employed. Then
54:23whatever progress we eke out on our jobs, on the job front,
54:29it's always under jeopardy because you could always lose the job or somebody might be willing to take
54:35the job without those benefits that we fought for. We see this slide on
54:43over the postwar period. We've seen this happen, the erosion of the good, stable job
54:48with a public option that guarantees employment at some
54:53basic wage, that provides an entirely different dynamic in the labor market.
55:00That means that if somebody wishes to offer you $7 an hour, they won't really be
55:05able to because you always have the 15 $20 option. If a
55:10an employer wants to harass you or take away your benefits, you can
55:16walk away. You can say no. And so it is really a structural
55:21kind of support that says, well, this is what we think has to be the basic job and it should be
55:26accessible to all and let the marketplace sort out the rest of the jobs in the economy.
55:32That is a very effective way of eliminating poverty, jobs. Right. It creates the
55:37so coveted competition, right, for the marketplace. So the bad
55:43employers are either driven out of business or they're incentivized to do better.
55:48So what I'm saying is law is not enough. You have to also have access to employment
55:54to be able to secure the floor and to be able to guarantee those benefits. I mean, you can
55:59think of it also as a as another tool to achieving other objectives.
56:04If the public option gives you Medicare, then employers that do
56:10not provide health care will have to think twice if they if they want you
56:15on the job. And they might again be urged to offer health care as well.
56:21So there are multiple benefits to to securing kind of a guaranteed, you know,
56:26public employment opportunity. All right. So to kind of wrap this up,
56:32in a sense, we've got to come full circle here and bring up
56:37a tweet by our nemesis here at Funny Money.
56:43And I want to speak to to this because there was a claim made that,
56:49historically speaking, you needed to have or it was important to have balanced
56:54budgets in order to keep the unemployment rate low. What's
56:59the problem with this framing in this argument?
57:05Look, these are two unrelated things. The unemployment rate can be
57:12very high with low deficit or vice versa.
57:17What we do know is, of course, when you have high unemployment, the public sector has to respond,
57:24Right? When you have high unemployment, you have lost incomes, you have lost tax revenue.
57:29The public sector, well, we have institutions that address or at least attempt to address
57:34the poverty that comes from unemployment. So they kick in automatically. Right. So there is
57:40there is some kind of a relationship, if you will, between government spending and large unemployment.
57:46But the point here is that the deficit is not a measure
57:51of well-being. It's not it should not be a target of policy. It's usually
57:57a reflection of something that's happening in the economy. And you may have very high unemployment.
58:02And you can have very low, low deficit, which is the case in Europe.
58:08And it's structurally they have decided that they have they should have these deficit rules and they have
58:13tied their hands and they're cutting their budgets and they have mass unemployment. So this is not
58:21a particularly useful way of thinking about either the deficit or the unemployment problem.
58:27One of the ways that I've heard this talked about before is to move away from this idea that we need
58:33sound finance in order to accomplish our goals in the macro economy,
58:38which really means like, what's happening to people's lives. The other way
58:44I've heard it talked about and I think this is a central component of the modern money
58:49paradigm, is to talk about functional finance, which is to say what are we trying to
58:55accomplish in the economy? It's not about what our budget or our deficit looks like, but it's
59:00actual like the real social health and environmental consequences
59:06that we can develop or foster in our economy, in real communities.
59:12Yeah, the deficit myth, you know, balancing the budget,
59:19whatever conventionally is understood as fiscal responsibility. I call fiscal
59:24irresponsibility. These are basically
59:29the the primary obstacles to achieving
59:35policy objectives. They hold policy hostage because they divert
59:40attention from the real problems. Do we have mass unemployment? Do we have
59:45large social costs? Do we have the real resources to address the Green New Deal
59:51objectives? Those are the real questions. Do we have inequality? Do we have opportunity?
59:57But the answer to these questions is always subjected to this
1:00:02litmus test is whether we have money and we have to put that to rest, because I
1:00:08don't know how many more teachable moments we need. We've had the financial crisis. We had COVID.
1:00:13We have endless wars, and we see that budgets and financial
1:00:19resources, money is mobilized on short order, no questions asked.
1:00:24Whenever whatever the policy priority is, it's never a question of whether we have the money.
1:00:30Yes, we do have the money and the size of the deficit has never been an obstacle
1:00:35to pursuing these objectives. And so at the same the same sort of thing has to happen with
1:00:41the Green New Deal, with jobs, with housing, with infrastructure. We need to be looking at
1:00:47what is the goal and to achieve it in terms of its real resources, finances, just a tool
1:00:53it enables our achieving our goals. And it is
1:00:58readily available as these crises amply demonstrate. Now that all of
1:01:03our listeners are just hungry for more of your work. Professor Tcherneva, I want to remind everyone that The Case
1:01:09For a Job Guarantee is a brilliant book that you should definitely get and read.
1:01:15Thank you so much for being with us, Professor Tcherneva, and breaking this down. Do you want to share anything about work
1:01:21you've got going on or other ways to follow what you have coming down the pike?
1:01:26Well, thanks. This is great conversation. I am, well, happily going on a sabbatical,
1:01:31but I have a new project called the Economic Democracy Initiative, which is
1:01:37creating a lot of curricular and research projects. So I would say definitely
1:01:43stay tuned. Follow me on Twitter and hopefully there'll be some new things coming up
1:01:48to share. Amazing. Very excited to check out the Economic Democracy Initiative. Also very, very exciting
1:01:53to share is that the job guarantee work is now
1:01:58going to be featured in a special report, U.N. report, to be released
1:02:04at the end of June. I was very happy to help
1:02:10with that report and will be participating in the launch. The reason why I think it's very exciting
1:02:15is because we are coming full circle to that conversation we began almost 100 years ago of how
1:02:21do we secure this basic human right? And with the report,
1:02:26I hope that countries will then well, they will have to respond
1:02:31and perhaps will take the moment to reflect on this new policy tool
1:02:36that, as I said, is under underappreciated and under utilized.
1:02:42Thank you.
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