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Is this a good time to discuss guaranteed jobs?
One of the things I want to do this year is to learn more about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Lat year I listened to a few episodes of The MMT Podcast and read a few articles about MMT that had me believing this was the missing piece that explained how the ideological foundations of austerity could be dug up and destroyed.
When Cory Doctorow appeared on The MMT Podcast not once, not twice, but four times….. and talked sense, as always, I was hooked. Listen here to the first of those episodes.
Two of the MMT books on my reading pile at the moment are Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and Pavlina Tcherneva’s the case for A Job Guarantee.
Early on in chapter 2 of the Tcherneva, she discusses the way neoliberal idealogues have convinced us that unemployment is not merely an unfortunate by-product of a successful economy but, indeed, essential. This is both morally corrupt and completely wrong.
Tcherneva uses the examples of starvation, homelessness, and education to point out the stupidity off a policy that states that a level of, say, 5% unemployment is unavoidable. Here is how she relates that to some other measures of a successful society:
“Suppose you heard that, in a strong economy, the optimal level of children who wanted to but were unable to receive…
