Tag Archives: Employment

The desire to judge people's motives rather than addressing their needs is a “British disease”. We have been suffering from it for hundreds of years, cycling endlessly through repeated cycles of generosity and harshness. Each cycle ends in public outrage and an abrupt reversal: but the memory eventually fades, and the disease reappears in a new form. In this post, I outline the tragic history of Britain's repeated attempts to "categorise the poor". For centuries, successive British...

The Job Guarantee is finally getting the public debate it deserves and criticism is expected. Building on several decades of research, the Levy Institute’s latest proposal analyzes the program’s economic impact and advances a blueprint for its implementation. Critics have taken note and are (thus far) restating the usual concerns, but with a notably alarmist tone. The latest, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, warns that the Job Guarantee would be 1) an expensive...

Michael Stephens | May 1, 2018 Pavlina Tcherneva — who, along with L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, and Stephanie Kelton, authored this report estimating the economic impact of a job guarantee proposal (the Public Service Employment program) — was interviewed by Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal and Julia Chatterley about the purposes and costs of the plan. This recently released policy note by L. Randall Wray also...

This week a friend casually explained that he and his wife considered having a second child. But having recently moved into a new house, they were having to fork out a large share of their income on mortgage interest payments. Hearing talk of potential rate rises had therefore persuaded them not to risk another pregnancy.Such are the life-changing impacts of decisions (or non-decisions) made by a group of men (and one woman) on the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank...

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...