Tag Archives: Employment

Ann Pettifor reviews The Everyday Economy by Rachel Reeves MP.“For if truth be at all within the reach of human capacity, ’tis certain it must lie very deep and abstruse…and to hope we shall arrive at it without pains, while the greatest geniuses have failed with the utmost pains, must certainly be esteemed sufficiently vain and presumptuous.”  - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature.At the launch last week of The Everyday Economy Rachel Reeves MP introduced her new short...

My colleague Chris Magee sent this graphs around about employment losses during different recessions. The first one below show all the recession from the 1970s onwards. The next one, which I modified to show just the Great Recession and the Great Depression, is below, and gives a sense of the dimension of the Depression. The sheer size of the Depression is impressive. Even though the last recession is an outlier, it pales in comparison with the Great Depression. You can see in the graph...

I’m about to start writing about the new proposal from Stephanie Kelton and her colleagues at the Levy Institute on the guaranteed jobs program, a proposal, by the way, that’s starting to get some serious notice. But ahead of that work I want to consider an extreme case, but not an unlikely one. What if, in the future, there simply aren’t enough jobs for everyone? What then? Put more simply, what’s the underlying assumption behind the world of the Jetsons? The late Stephen Hawking, in his...

MMT.MediumCapitalism and the veil of ignorance Claire Connelly 

Policymakers have helped to perpetuate an economic model that is ultimately unsustainable. The article is based on Bill Mitchell's analysis of US unemployment.AlterNetThe Fed Is on the Verge of Making a Major Policy ErrorMarshall Auerback / AlterNet

I’ve just written a blog post about homelessness and employment, with a focus on Calgary (where I live and work). Points raised in the blog post include the following: -Persons experiencing homelessness usually have poor health outcomes, making it especially challenging to find and sustain employment. -There are several non-profits in Calgary that assist persons experiencing homelessness to find and sustain work. -Persons finding the most success in those programs tend to be relatively...

I’ve written a blog post about this year’s Alternative Federal Budget (AFB). Points raised in the blog post include the following: -This year’s AFB would create 470,000 (full-time equivalent) jobs in its first year alone. By year 2 of the plan, 600,000 new (full-time equivalent) jobs will exist. -This year’s AFB will also bring in universal pharmacare, address involuntary part-time employment among women, eliminate tuition fees for all post-secondary students in Canada, speed up...

Productivity growth (the rate at which technology is displacing workers) had slowed to roughly 1.0 percent annually in the years since 2005. This compares to a 3.0 percent growth rate in the decade from 1995 to 2005 and the long Golden Age from 1947 to 1973. Most economists expect the rate of productivity growth to remain near 1.0 percent as opposed to returning back to something close to its 3.0 percent rate in more prosperous times.…  It is also worth noting that the high productivity...

JG v. UBICounterpunchThe Unemployment ConspiracyBruce Lesnick

On December 8, 2017, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – November 2017 – which showed that total non-farm employment from the payroll survey rose by 228,000 in November, slightly less than the October net increase. While the payroll data showed a fairly strong employment outcome, the Labour Force Survey data estimated a weaker rise in employment (57 thousand) in November. The labour force was estimated to have...