The Means of Prediction: How AI Really Works (And Who Benefits)
by Maximilian Kasy · 15 Jan 2025 · 209pp · 63,332 words
line of research, I work on economic inequality and what policy can do to enable a full and secure life for everyone. I study pilot job-guarantee and basic-income programs. I believe that researchers have an obligation to contribute to a society where we collectively debate and decide our own future
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requires time, resources, and effort, especially when we move beyond the standard model of representative democracy. We might consider ideas such as basic-income or job-guarantee policies to facilitate participation, while providing a social safety net. Democratic deliberation could be supported by a basic income that is available to everyone, conditional
Battling Eight Giants: Basic Income Now
by Guy Standing · 19 Mar 2020
Piloting basic income in Britain 5 Taking the first steps 1 39 53 67 83 Appendix A: Experience with pilots 87 Appendix B: Why a job guarantee would be no alternative 101 Appendix C: Why ‘universal basic services’ would be no alternative 108 Notes 115 Index 131 Acknowledgements T his book, based
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Towns and Municipalities, lamenting the over-burdened bureaucratic welfare state and rising poverty, has come out in favour of basic income. Appendix B: Why a job guarantee would be no alternative The claim made in this book is that a basic income would promote social justice, freedom and basic security while combating
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the eight giants, in ways that other possible policies would not. Among the policies advocated as alternatives is a job guarantee for everyone, or for everyone ‘able to work’.1 In the United States, several prominent Democrat senators and possible candidates for the 2020 presidential election
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Kirsten Gillibrand. In Britain The Guardian has endorsed it unequivocally as ‘a welcome return to a politics of work’.2 The Guardian claimed that a job guarantee policy ‘would secure a basic human right to engage in productive employment’. Throughout history, the vast majority of people would have found that a very
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have also been at the heart of labour law, which is based on the master–servant model. 102 Appendix B The newspaper added that the job guarantee ‘would only offer employment under-supplied by the private sector’, singling out ‘environmental clean-up’ and ‘social care’. These may sound appealing on paper but
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have been created anyhow. If somebody is given a guaranteed job at the minimum wage, what happens to others already doing such jobs? Would the job guarantee agency guarantee their jobs as well, with no decline in wages if they happened to be higher? If the unemployed were offered a job at
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, if only because public sector managers would have an incentive to hire those workers with guaranteed jobs at lower wages and worse working conditions. The job guarantee scheme would thereby put downward pressure on the wages and working conditions of middle-income jobs.4 Ro Khanna, a California Democrat congressman, has said
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to one that has been in it for a while, giving the newcomer an unfair advantage? The Guardian further claimed, without citing evidence, that a job guarantee scheme would not be inflationary because ‘any restructuring of relative wages would be a one-off event’. This contradicts generations of research. If all were
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be fear of automation and more offshoring. But it would hardly be fear, as a job would be guaranteed anyhow! The gross cost of a job guarantee might outweigh the net gain. If the government guaranteed the minimum wage in guaranteed jobs, those in jobs paying less (or working fewer than the
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someone in their household who is.6 Would they all become eligible for a guaranteed good job? 104 Appendix B At its unlikely best, a job guarantee would be paternalistic. It presumes the government knows what is best for individuals, who would be offered a necessarily limited range of jobs at its
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take a guaranteed job on a construction site (‘infrastructure’, a favoured area for guaranteed jobs) and that person proved incompetent and was injured. Would the job guarantee agency be held responsible and pay compensation? It should, since it put the person in that position. How would that be factored into the costing
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of a job guarantee scheme? Similarly, if a person put into a ‘social care’ job was negligent and caused harm or distress to the care recipient, would the latter
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be able to sue the job guarantee agency for compensation? In addition, a job guarantee scheme would spring a familiar trap – the phoney distinction between those who ‘can work’ and would thus be eligible for a guaranteed
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-work’ and ‘availability-for-work’ tests, resulting in more discriminatory action against disabled and vulnerable people, and those with care responsibilities. Another failing of the job guarantee route is the mapping of a path to ‘workfare’. What would happen to somebody who declined to accept the guaranteed job? They would be labelled
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, and be directed into jobs, whether they liked them or not. Jobs done in resentment or under duress are unlikely to be done well. A job guarantee would be a recipe for perpetuating low productivity. What would happen if a person in a guaranteed job performed poorly, Appendix B 105 perhaps because
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type is guaranteed, what happens if an employer wishes to invest in technology that would remove the need for such jobs? Those calling for a job guarantee also ignore the fact that any market economy requires some unemployment, as people need time to search for jobs they are prepared to accept, and
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firms must sift applicants for jobs they want to have done. To adopt a job guarantee policy would risk putting the economy in gridlock. Job guarantee advocates, such as Larry Summers, President Clinton’s former treasury secretary, argue that people without jobs ‘are much more likely to
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% of jobholders did not think their job made any significant contribution. 106 Appendix B Summers ends his article by equivocating that ‘the idea of a jobs guarantee should be taken seriously but not literally.’ He seems to mean government should try to promote more employment, through ‘wage subsidies, targeted government spending, support
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distortions, tending to displace workers employed in the ‘free’ labour market and to depress their wages, the job guarantee proposal fails to recognize that today’s crisis is structural and requires transformative policies. Tax credits, job guarantees and statutory minimum wages would barely touch the precariat’s existential insecurity that is at the heart
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the third runway at Heathrow airport being recent examples, where the promise of more jobs has trumped costs to health and the environment. And a job guarantee policy could have a strong appeal to the political right as a way to dismantle the welfare state. Why pay unemployment benefits if everybody has
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a guaranteed job? In the United States, one conservative commentator chortled that ‘over 100 federal welfare programs would be replaced with a single job guarantee program’.10 Finally, there is what this writer regards as the policy’s worst feature. It would reinforce twentieth-century labourism, by failing to make
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and leisure that are self-chosen and oriented to personal and community development. There is one last point, to do with the claim that a job guarantee would be politically popular. Much is made of a US poll which asked people whether they would support a scheme to guarantee a job for
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, ‘Baby Steps Toward Guaranteed Incomes and Racial Justice’, New York Times, 8 May 2019. Appendix B 1 This discussion draws on G. Standing, ‘Why a Job Guarantee Is a Bad Joke for the Precariat and for Freedom’, Open Democracy, 7 September 2018. 2 ‘The Guardian View on a
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Job Guarantee: A Policy Whose Time Has Come’, The Guardian, 3 May 2018; P. Gregg and R. Layard, ‘A Job Guarantee’, London School of Economics, 2009. 3 For a critique, see G. Standing, ‘Why a Basic Income
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Is Necessary for a Right to Work’, Basic Income Studies 7 (2), 2013, pp. 19–40. 4 M. Sandbu, ‘Free Lunch Economics: Jobs Guarantee Is a Distant SecondBest Policy’, Financial Times, 2 July 2018. 5 K. Aronoff, ‘Rep. Ro Khanna to Introduce Compromise “Jobs for All” Bill’, The Intercept
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those quit in hope of obtaining a guaranteed better-paying job. 7 E. Loomis, ‘The Case for a Federal Jobs Guarantee’, New York Times, 25 April 2018. 128 Notes 8 L. Summers, ‘A Jobs Guarantee – Progressives’ Latest Big Idea’, Financial Times, 2 July 2018. 9 G. Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens
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, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 10 J. Dorfman, ‘Job Guarantee: A Liberal Idea That Conservatives May Embrace’, Forbes Magazine, 1 May 2018. 11 G. Standing, Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009
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. 12 S. McElwee, C. McAuliffe and J. Green, ‘Why Democrats Should Embrace a Federal Jobs Guarantee’, The Nation, 20 March 2018. Appendix C 1 This discussion draws on G. Standing, ‘Why “Universal Basic Services” Is No Alternative to Basic Income’, Open
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individuals 86 Low Pay Commission 63 low-wage jobs 60, 107 Luddite reaction 32 lump-sum payments 35, 59, 76 Jackson, Mississippi 99 JobCentrePlus 47 job guarantee policy 101–7 job-matching programs 106 Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) 41, 46 Joseph Rowntree Foundation 21 McDonnell, John 129 n.13 McKinsey Global Institute
A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing · 3 May 2017 · 307pp · 82,680 words
many studies that have found a preference for cash over what bureaucrats think people want and need. Guaranteed Jobs It is sometimes claimed that a ‘job guarantee’ would be preferable to a basic income because jobs are believed to have some sort of intrinsic value beyond the income they bring in (a
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sense of identity and contribution to the community, structured time, interaction with fellow workers, and so on) that makes people happier. Proponents of a ‘job guarantee’ include Lord (Richard) Layard, who was Tony Blair’s ‘happiness czar’, in the UK22 and Harvey and Quigley in the US, following the earlier advocacy
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by Minsky.23 The objections to this policy include some that apply with even more force to the next policy option, namely workfare. A job guarantee would be a deception. What sort of jobs would be guaranteed? At what rate of pay would they be provided? What would be the consequence
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best low-productivity, labour. Cleaning the streets, filling shelves in supermarkets and similar menial activities are an unlikely road to happiness. Those arguing for a job guarantee would certainly not want those jobs for themselves or their children. One reason given for supporting guaranteed jobs is that surveys suggest unemployed people are
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, less than a fifth of those with jobs feel engaged. Proposals for spreading employment, for instance, by shortening working hours, shade into those for a job guarantee. Emran Mian, director of the Social Market Foundation, argues for a redistribution of labour, ‘even if that might reduce economic efficiency, rather than hand out
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the underpinning of a basic income, statutorily reducing working hours would impoverish many people on low wages while doing little to create additional jobs. Most ‘job guarantee’ advocates also ignore the fact that market economies need some unemployment to function. A seminal article by A. W. Phillips in 1958 posited an inverse
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NAIRU or non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment). In a market economy, therefore, no government can guarantee a job to everybody who wants one. A job guarantee, to the extent that it could be operationalized, might satisfy the Security Difference Principle, if suitable jobs could be provided for those with disabilities or
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. 106–30. 9. N. Hines (2016), ‘Robots could make universal basic income a necessity’, Inverse, 11 August. 10. M. Naim (2016), ‘As robots take our jobs, guaranteed income might ease the pain’, HuffPost, 18 July. 11. P.-E. Gobry (2014), ‘ “Progressives” hot new poverty-fighting idea has just one basic problem: Science
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_6-13.pdf. 20. Bhalla, ‘Dismantling the welfare state’. 21. Hidrobo et al., ‘Cash, food, or vouchers?’. 22. P. Gregg and R. Layard (2009), A Job Guarantee. London: Centre for Economic Performance Working Paper, London School of Economics. http://cep.lse.ac.uk/textonly/_new/staff/layard/pdf/001JGProposal-16-03-09
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income guarantees: Competing or complementary goals?’, Rutgers Journal of Law and Urban Policy, 2(1), pp. 8–59. P. Harvey (2013), ‘More for less: The job guarantee strategy’, Basic Income Studies, 7(2), pp. 3–18. W. Quigley (2003), Ending Poverty as We Know It: Guaranteeing a Right to a Job at
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’, in H. L. Minsky (2013), Ending Poverty: Jobs, Not Welfare. Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Levy Economics Institute, Bard College. 24. K. McFarland (2016), ‘Basic income, job guarantees and the non-monetary value of jobs: Response to Davenport and Kirby’, Basic Income News, 5 September. 25. E. Mian (2016), ‘Basic income is a
Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght · 20 Mar 2017
Basic Income Versus Guaranteed Employment Another mea�sure sometimes proposed as an alternative to an unconditional basic income is a �legal entitlement to a job: guaranteed employment rather than guaranteed income, a right to work with an income rather than a right to an income without work. Many of the early
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the Â�Great Confinement: The Genealogy of a German WorkÂ�house.” Journal of Modern History 71(2): 308–345. Harvey, Philip L. 2006. “Funding a Job Guarantee.” International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment 2(1): 114–132. —Â�—Â�—. 2011. Back to Work: A Public Jobs Proposal for Economic Recovery. New
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York: Demos. —Â�—Â�—. 2012. “More for Less: The Job Guarantee Strategy.” Basic Income Studies 7(2): 3–18. —Â�—Â�—. 2014. “Securing the Right to Work and Income Security.” In Elise Dermine and Daniel Dumont
Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn
by Chris Hughes · 20 Feb 2018 · 173pp · 53,564 words
women do. The malicious ways work requirements have been used in the past make me suspicious of some calls on the left for a federal job guarantee in lieu of a guaranteed income. Its basic premise is that the tens of millions of people who aren’t participating in the formal workforce
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significantly higher than a guaranteed income, up to $775 billion a year for 14 million new government employees. There is little evidence that such a job guarantee program would work. A 2015 study by prominent economists ranked the effectiveness of 200 examples of labor market interventions. They found that subsidized public-sector
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employment programs consistently came in last, sometimes even having negative impacts. The arguments for a federal job guarantee require faith in government’s ability to connect people to jobs they want and need. The idea of relying on a DMV-like federal jobs
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jobs to lots of people—nearly 15 percent of the American workforce is already employed by federal, state, or local governments. But relying on a job guarantee to provide broad economic stability is a step too far. It falls squarely in the tradition of government telling poor and middle-class people what
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-trust-in-government-1958-2017/). Paul, Mark, William Darity Jr., Darrick Hamilton, and Anne E. Price. “Returning to the Promise of Full Employment: A Federal Job Guarantee in the United States.” Insight Center for Community Economic Development, June 2017. https://insightcced.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/insight_fjg_brief_2017.pdf
The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
by Stephanie Kelton · 8 Jun 2020 · 338pp · 104,684 words
administration. We urged Congress to enact a robust stimulus, calling for a payroll tax holiday, additional aid for state and local governments, and a federal job guarantee. By January 16, 2009, America’s four largest financial institutions had lost half their value, and the labor market was hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of
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government spending and taxation to fight off inflation once it begins to accelerate. To supplement discretionary fiscal policy (the steering wheel), MMT recommends a federal job guarantee, which creates a nondiscretionary automatic stabilizer that promotes both full employment and price stability. Think of a poorly maintained roadway. You get a smooth ride
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does, involuntary unemployment disappears. Anyone seeking paid employment has guaranteed access to a job at a rate of remuneration established by the federal government. The job guarantee has its origins in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who wanted the government to guarantee employment as an economic right of all people. It
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might lose a job sorting boxes for a private retailer, but you could immediately secure employment performing a useful job in public service. Because the job guarantee allows workers to transition into alternative employment rather than joining the ranks of the unemployed, the program helps to cushion the overall economy by supporting
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economy recovers and workers begin to transition back into private sector jobs. And because spending to hire workers into the program becomes automatic once the job guarantee is in place, we don’t have to rely on discretionary spending to smooth the ride.24 The federal government guarantees the financing, establishes the
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to rescue the economy with fiscal stimulus. Because the program supports incomes, the economy stabilizes more quickly than it would in the absence of the job guarantee. The downturn is less severe, and the recovery arrives sooner. And because it’s a permanent program, it’s there to buttress the economy
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that wage. To establish a universal minimum, there must be a standing offer to bid for labor at some positive price. The job guarantee establishes that minimum bid, making the job guarantee wage the de facto minimum wage throughout the economy. Once established, any other form of employment would be expected to offer a
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introduces an inflationary bias that is mitigated when businesses have the option to hire from a pool of employed public service workers instead. With the job guarantee in place, employers have an expanded pool of potential workers from which to hire. It benefits not only employers and those who would otherwise languish
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are lost to foreign competition. Federal programs like Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)14 are important, but something more is needed. That something is a federal job guarantee. By no means is it a panacea, but at a minimum, it begins to tackle the problem of unemployment directly (as opposed to subsidizing the
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were lost with a way to remain employed right in their communities. But it would have done more than that. The benefits of a federal job guarantee not only include the production of goods, services, and income. The guarantee also features on-the-job training and skill development; poverty alleviation; community
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never achieved anything like true full employment. It’s something we’ve rarely experienced, outside of wartime. One of the most important features of a job guarantee program is that it maintains a form of full employment by immediately rehiring the unemployed into public service work, providing them with income and the
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how we can all move toward a more prosperous, sustainable, and peaceful planet. Ultimately, as Tcherneva has suggested, we’ll need something like a global job guarantee.35 As I write this book, the International Labour Organization estimates that almost two hundred million people around the world are involuntarily unemployed.36 Export
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world’s governments. But we can run the dominant currency in a way that makes global full employment something everyone could actually achieve. With decent jobs guaranteed for all, workers can engage in a public-led industrial policy aimed at producing sustainable infrastructure and a wider array of public services. Closer to
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in the deals it helps to craft. It can demand strict ecological standards of its trading partners, as well as robust labor protections, like a job guarantee, geared toward helping poorer nations achieve food and energy sovereignty. It can insist that its trading partners share green technology and intellectual property with other
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easier for workers to collectively bargain and by sustaining the kind of tight labor markets we saw during World War II—through things like a job guarantee and public investment and better macroeconomic policy. Until we do so, the democracy deficit will leave us with “an education system in which you
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millions of people back to work. Mosler believed that Congress could essentially fix things in three easy steps.2 First, he wanted a federally funded job guarantee to make sure that every unemployed worker could immediately transition back into paid employment. Second, he called for a payroll tax holiday that would have
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economy—and more importantly, the people, families, and communities in it—MMT recommends the addition of a powerful new automatic stabilizer, known as a federal job guarantee. We first encountered the idea in Chapter 2, where it was shown that we could achieve genuine full employment—a job for every person who
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driverless stabilizer, the steering wheel will always turn in the right direction at the right moment in time. To understand the economic logic behind the job guarantee, think back to Chapter 1 and the story of Warren Mosler’s business cards. Remember that Mosler wanted a tidy house, clean cars, and
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the government’s unit of account. The US dollar is basically a tax credit. MMT is the only macroeconomic approach that understands this, and the job guarantee follows directly from this understanding. Once you realize this, it becomes clear that any currency-issuing government has the power to eliminate domestic unemployment simply
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, MMT economists have recommended that these jobs pay a living wage and that the work itself should serve a useful public purpose.25 Since the job guarantee would establish a permanent commitment, it would become a mandatory (as opposed to discretionary) federal spending program. As with other mandatory programs—for example,
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the private sector is ready to begin hiring again, workers will move out of the program and the budget will automatically shrink. This makes the job guarantee a powerful new automatic stabilizer, one that would fortify the existing driverless mechanisms in the federal budget.26 From a purely economic standpoint, the major
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advantage of the job guarantee is its ability to stabilize employment over the business cycle. This doesn’t just benefit those who are able to quickly find new jobs. It
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turn against deficits when the economy is skidding off course. As the economy gets back on track, companies begin hiring workers out of the federal job guarantee program. When this happens, those workers fall off the government budget, and the steering wheel automatically adjusts to reduce the size of the deficit.
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So, the job guarantee is a powerful economic stabilizer. By maintaining incomes and keeping people employed throughout the business cycle, future recessions would be shorter lasting and less severe
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care of our aging population and ensuring that children have the resources they need to thrive in their infancy and early childhood. In short, the job guarantee is the MMT solution to our chronic jobs deficit. Instead of trapping millions in unemployment as a sacrificial tribute to the “natural rate” of unemployment
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the private sector can readily hire at a modest premium over the program wage. Further, by establishing the right to a living-wage job, the job guarantee strengthens the bargaining power of labor, reduces racial inequities, decreases poverty, and raises the floor on low-wage work while building stronger, more vibrant,
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more connected communities.34 Has anything like this ever been tried? No country has implemented a full-fledged job guarantee, but a number of countries have experimented with versions of the idea. In the 1930s, the US fought the Great Depression by directly creating millions
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but the programs weren’t permanent, and they didn’t guarantee employment to all. Argentina’s Jefes de Hogar plan wasn’t a full-throated job guarantee either, but in 2001 it became “the only direct job creation program in the world specifically modelled after” the proposal developed by MMT economists.35
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was high, the government guaranteed one hundred days of minimum wage work—with wages equal for men and women—for any rural household. India’s job guarantee remains targeted (rather than universal), but it’s one of the largest federally funded employment guarantee programs in the world. Studies have shown that by
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You want them there at all times because you know you get a better ride with them than without. The same is true of the job guarantee. Without it, we rely on weaker stabilizers that provide temporary income to the unemployed, while permanently trapping millions of people in an unemployed buffer stock
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. With the job guarantee in place, we can use full employment to absorb the inevitable bumps in the road. Experience shows that creating jobs for the unemployed works. It
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Diet, the British Parliament, and other governing bodies are full of public officials who should, but very often do not, budget for the people. The job guarantee offers a partial solution.44 It forces the budget to respond automatically to changing economic conditions, and unlike tax cuts that never actually trickle down
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to those in need, the job guarantee targets communities that are hardest hit by unemployment. That means income goes directly into the hands of those who need it most. But we can
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Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, April 2018, www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_4_18.pdf. 23. The job guarantee has its origins in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who wanted the government to guarantee employment as an economic right of all people. It
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real sense, it’s the only way to know for sure how substantially the economy is underutilizing available resources. 24. This means that the federal job guarantee becomes a new category of mandatory spending, much like Social Security or Medicare. The spending is nondiscretionary in the sense that lawmakers do not constrain
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Americans were losing their jobs each month. 28. It might technically be possible for private employers to hire workers at a lower wage than the job guarantee program provides. If, for example, the job came with especially generous paid leave, more flexible work arrangements, better access to public transportation, or simply
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also discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, and physical disabilities and are prejudiced against the formerly incarcerated and the homeless. The federal job guarantee establishes a right to employment for all. 31. Top Democrats met with President Trump in 2019 to see if they could find a way to
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Volcker shock also devastated US workers, shutting down factories in the Midwest and ending manufacturing competitiveness with countries like Japan. Had the US established a job guarantee employment policy to automatically stabilize the economy at full employment—as MMTers and our forebears would have recommended and as many US civil rights activists
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2018 Did Not Apply for Unemployment Insurance Benefits,” econintersect.com, econintersect.com/pages/contributors/contributor.php?post=201910220659. 23. In the version of the federal job guarantee developed by MMT economists, anyone who is legally eligible to work—age sixteen and over and a US citizen or noncitizens who are legally permitted
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Employment, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, April 2018, www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/rpr_4_18.pdf. 24. Economists have proposed different versions of a job guarantee. This chapter features the version put forward by leading MMT economists. Workers would be paid $15/hr along with benefits (health care, childcare, and paid
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). For an alternative version that incorporates differential compensation based on experience and other considerations, see Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton, “The Federal Job Guarantee—A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 9, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal
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In contrast to many of the Roosevelt-era New Deal programs, which excluded blacks and other minority groups from participating, the job guarantee would ensure universal access to all. 26. The job guarantee is not meant to replace any of the existing safety net programs. All of them, including unemployment insurance, can be maintained
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al., Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment. 30. For a more thorough discussion of how this would work, see Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “The Job Guarantee: Design, Jobs, and Implementation,” Working Paper No. 902, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, April 2018, www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_902.pdf. 31.
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, proximity to day care, a feeling of connectedness to neighborhoods, gained respect, and a sense of empowerment. See Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “Modern Money and the Job Guarantee,” posted by Jacobin, Vimeo, January 9, 2014, 14:02, vimeo.com/83813741. 38. Public Works & Infrastructure, “Welcome to EPWP” (webpage), Department: Public Works and Infrastructure
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2018, www.beaconbroadside.com/broadside/2018/03/the-50th-anniversary-of-martin-luther-king-jrs-all-labor-has-dignity.html. 44. We could augment the job guarantee with other new automatic stabilizers. The more driverless features we attach to the budget mechanism, the smoother our economic ride will become. Indexing wages (or
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other spending) in the job guarantee program to the inflation target—as opposed to the actual inflation rate—would provide an automatic boost to expenditures when actual inflation was running below
Economic Dignity
by Gene Sperling · 14 Sep 2020 · 667pp · 149,811 words
running for president in 2019.14 It was a common theme of New Jersey senator Cory Booker in his presidential campaign as well. Advocates of job guarantees like Darrick Hamilton, and Rustin and Randolph before him, often point to “dignity” as a basis for ensuring that Americans can always provide for themselves
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-democratic-party; and “The Dignity of Work,” accessed November 5, 2019, https://dignityofwork.com/. 15. Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton, “The Federal Job Guarantee—A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, March 9, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal
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-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment. 16. Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist No. 1,” October 27, 1787, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/federalist-no-1/. 17.
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, 79–80, 265 Jefferson, Thomas, 24 Jim Crow laws, 63, 284, 293 Jimmy John’s Gourmet Sandwiches, 264 job churn, 129 “job crafting,” 227–28 job guarantees, 15 job intermediaries, 197–98 job losses, 131–34, 133, 137–38, 221 job navigators, 212–15, 338n job promotions, 229, 232–33 Jobs, Laurene
Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow · 26 Sep 2022 · 396pp · 113,613 words
, without them, we’ve ended up in another robber baron era. One systematic solution that would provide a continuing check on these abuses is a job guarantee. These can be formulated in any number of different ways, but the kind we’re talking about is a federally funded, locally administered job for
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art, and any number of other activities that support the public good. There are people who need work and work that needs doing, and a job guarantee would unite the two where the market fails to do so. Providing nonmarket jobs is particularly important for art. Excessively powerful corporations are a huge
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we leave their funding entirely to the market, eventually they’ll no longer be possible, and important parts of human culture will be lost. A job guarantee for creative workers could help prevent that. There’s precedent for this: the US successfully responded to the Great Depression in the 1930s by creating
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array of craftspeople,” generating “an explosion of creativity and a staggering body of work,” including live music performances that reached 150 million people.27 A job guarantee would mean that the day you lose your employment you could pick up a new, dignified job—including whatever training that requires—until someone in
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the private sector decides to offer you a better one. With a job guarantee, no one would suffer the paradox of chronic unemployment—when employers won’t hire you because you don’t have a job—and we’d
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get done important, socially valuable work that is not valued by the market. One criticism of job guarantees is that they’re too expensive and can’t possibly be afforded. That isn’t so. For one thing, they’re not all that expensive
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to prioritize full employment in dignified and socially useful work, there are ways to achieve it without blowing the economy up. Right-wing economists criticize job guarantees by arguing that offering everyone a good job would create “pressure to introduce a higher wage or certain benefits that the private sector doesn’t
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offer.”32 They’re so close to getting it. A jobs guarantee would indeed increase the share of GDP that goes to labor, because every private sector employer would know its workers could shift into public work
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if the conditions were better there. That’s why a job guarantee is such a powerful response to chokepoint capitalists. The only reason megacorporations can steal wages and divert such a big share of profits to investors
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is because their workers and suppliers have no other choice. By giving them one, a job guarantee would put a meaningful floor under pay and conditions. As private sector conditions improved, people would move away from guaranteed jobs and back into the
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market. But the public jobs would always be there, a built-in safeguard to respond when corporations grow too abusive. Of course, a job guarantee is just one potential response to corporate shakedowns. There’s a lot more we need to do—and that can feel overwhelming. Confronted with all
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Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7. 26. Bradley Thomas, “Why Bernie Sanders’s Universal Job Guarantee Is Fool’s Gold,” Foundation for Economic Education, Oct. 25, 2019, https://fee.org/articles/why-universal-job-guarantees-are-fool-s-gold. 27. Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal
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(New York: Penguin, 2019). 28. Mark Paul, William Darity Jr., and Darrick Hamilton, “The Federal Job Guarantee—A Policy to Achieve Permanent Full Employment,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Mar. 9, 2018, https://www.cbpp.org/research/full-employment/the-federal
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-job-guarantee-a-policy-to-achieve-permanent-full-employment. 29. Andrew Van Dam, “The U.S. Has Thrown More Than $6 Trillion at the Coronavirus Crisis. That
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of its own currency can’t help it pay down those debts). 32. Dylan Matthews, “4 Big Questions about Job Guarantees,” Vox, Apr. 27, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/4/27/17281676/job-guarantee-design-bad-jobs-labor-market-federal-reserve. 33. Apple, “Japan Fair Trade Commission Closes App Store Investigation,” Apple Newsroom
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, 171–72; arbitration, 166–67; atomization of labor and, 31; collective ownership, 229–30; creator visibility and power, 169–70; importance of, 246–47, 256; job guarantees, 251–56; organizing, 178–79; private coordination and, 171–72; Writers Guild of America (WGA), 173–77 college tuition, 249 Comcast, 5 command economy, 13
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streaming, 198; virtual machines, 198; voluntary, 200–201 iWork, 202 Japan Fair Trade Commission, 258 Jay-Z, 2, 160 Jennings, Tom, 201 Jensen, Rich, 237 job guarantees, 251–56 Johannessen, Chip, 105 Johnson, Dennis, 21–22 Johnson, Paul, 78 Kanopy, 242 Kanter, Jonathan, 147 Karim, Jawed, 124 Karp, Irwin, 184 Kates, Mark
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, 173 Klein, Naomi, 152, 254 Knowledge Ecology International, 153 Kobalt, 73 Kowal, Mary Robinette, 212–13 Kun, Josh, 59 labor, 5–6, 253–54 labor, job guarantees, 251–56 labor market and geography, 15–16 LaPolt, Dina, 61 lending right, public, 242–44 Leonard, Christopher, 96 leveraged buyouts, 91–93 libraries, 35
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leftist vision for society remains unsettled. Few debates better exemplify this than that between proponents of a universal basic income (UBI) and proponents of a jobs guarantee (JG). There are many flavors of UBI, with many different names and important nuances to policy. But the concept of the UBI (or guaranteed minimum
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the plight of the poor, whether they are working or not. And that power ensures that whatever policies do get instituted are politically defensible. A jobs guarantee program is just what it sounds like. A government agency would ensure that everyone who wants a job can get one, not through the traditional
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socially valuable but of dubious profit-generating value; typically tasks like environmental cleanup, childcare, and public art projects are named as potential jobs guarantee office jobs. One advantage of the jobs guarantee is that it is inherently countercyclical: in times of recession, when there are too few jobs for the number of workers, the
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ensure people can avoid poverty; in boom times, employers would compete for workers and the jobs on offer would be more attractive than a jobs guarantee job. Jobs guarantee advocates further argue that such a guarantee has the advantage of being both not means tested (as anyone who wants to can get one of
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it’s only those who lack a quality job who would sign up). As you might expect, universal basic income supporters have criticisms of jobs guarantee programs, just as jobs guarantee people criticize the UBI. Matt Bruenig, founder of the left-wing think tank People’s Policy Project, has been particularly consistent in pointing
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out problems with a jobs guarantee. As he observes, it’s hard to see how there will always naturally be work that needs doing that simultaneously does not satisfy the profit
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motive. Jobs guarantee jobs must satisfy some intrinsic need, but that need must not be sufficient for someone to set up a for-profit operation to do it
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; this is a thin needle to thread. It’s also important to note that, by their universal nature, most jobs guarantee jobs need to not require special skills or abilities, limiting the range of work that can be done. Finally, it’s possible that the
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jobs guarantee will not improve the bargaining position of workers but do the opposite. Matt Bruenig writes, “as long as the JG wage is fixed, all the
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to their workers.”18 As for myself, my basic fear with a jobs guarantee is that it may likely become a shitty jobs guarantee. That is, the work that is secured through a jobs guarantee might be decently remunerative but could be filled with jobs guarantee participants precisely because no one else wants the work, whether because it
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’s unpleasant, it’s dangerous, or there’s no room for advancement. At worst, jobs guarantee jobs might simply become make-work programs, with whatever government agency that runs the program creating jobs simply because there’s nothing better on offer
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more just world. And yet the differences between these positions are vast: the basic assumption of a jobs guarantee is that work is good; the basic assumption of a UBI is that work is bad. Jobs guarantee people call work ennobling; UBI people call it degrading. (For the record, both are right in different
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not minor differences. For myself, I will risk a little bit of opportunistic incoherence and say that I have the same attitude toward UBI and jobs guarantee: neither is remotely sufficient to fix our society, but I’d take either. Would a UBI solve most of our social and economic problems? No
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. Would I take a UBI if I had the chance? Absolutely. And so too with a jobs guarantee. Such a thing would be terribly insufficient to solving our problems, but I’d take it in a heartbeat over abject poverty. I understand why
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am not remotely as opposed to either as I am to the poverty- and hopelessness-filled status quo. Neither a universal basic income nor a jobs guarantee comes without problems and complications. But each can help save us from our smart-kids-take-all economy. Genuine Socialism The term “socialism” is a
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/25/f829f406-48bf-11e8-8b5a-3b1697adcc2a_story.html, accessed February 18, 2019. 18. Matt Bruenig, “Just What Is a Job Guarantee?,” Jacobin, May 5, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/05/full-employment-job-guarantee-bernie-bruenig, accessed February 14, 2019. 19. Frederick Kirschenmann, “How Many Farmers Will We ‘Need’?,” Leopold Letter, winter 2000
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and heritability of intelligence and Wilson effect See also talent international students iPads IQ. See intelligence and IQ Iraq War Israel-Palestine question Jim Crow jobs guarantee (JG) Joseph, Jay journalism and journalists education journalism and socioeconomic class “just deserts” school of human achievement juvenile detention system Kagan, Elena Katrina, Hurricane Katz
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. W. Marx, Karl Marxism. See also communism; socialism mass consumption master’s degrees and master’s programs Math Myth, The (Hacker) McCarthyism means testing and jobs guarantee and student loan debt forgiveness and universal childcare and afterschool programs Medicare for All Menand, Louis mental health needs, schools for merit pay meritocracy and
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the Congressional Black Caucus (they still cared about jobs; the black unemployment rate was 20 percent) grew frosty because Carter refused to advocate restoring the jobs guarantee in the further-weakened bill the House was considering—with speculation Carter might veto even that, his fulsome eulogy for its namesake notwithstanding. Richard Nixon
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