Post by Iain Dooley on Aug 20, 2016 6:13:12 GMT
Hey Edwin, the design of a JG is specifically to be an "employer of last resort" and to be elastic. This means that the nature of the jobs must be that they can be done or not done at various times. They can't be mission critical government services.
I think we need a government budget framework that controls or disciplines government spending using primarily automatic stabilisers (like social security and JG payments) in addition to a basket of public services that are deemed to be either in the national interest (such as crucial R&D into food and energy security, education and health) or natural monpolies (such as public transport systems) -- this would serve to "discipline" government spending so it was non-inflatonary but at the same time not artificially constraining us to a "dollar taxed/dollars spent/dollar borrowed" model that we have now (I'm going to do a separate post on this in a the structural reform section on budget process reform ... )
However a lot of this stuff is written down in the literature on job guarantees and in particular in the paper referenced from Bill Mitchell at the start of this thread.
The process I want to pursue for policy discussions is to analyse academic or special interest group or government publications through the lens of our policy frameworks.
Rather than discussing this as a matter of opinion (ie. "do you think this? I think that") what would be most helpful is if you were able to read through Bill's entire paper, extract quotes here that would be relevant to the creation of a comprehensive Job Guarantee proposal, identify what points of contention there might be, look for competing academic work from other MMT economists (for example on the nature of jobs, the role of welfare etc.) and discuss things in that context.
That's the "real work" of policy development that needs to be done.
My primary focus at the moment is not policy development, but promotion. I created this forum as a space to being policy development discussions because some people both in the FB group and on Twitter started to ask really detailed policy discussion questions, and I think this the forum in which we'll engage with that over the long term.
Day to day, though, my work at the moment is primarily on getting the podcast out, writing to people, writing articles, engaging on social media, etc. I also engage on the forum here but, for example it will be a long time before I have the chance to read through Bill's paper in detail.
Until I've done that, I don't really have that definite an opinion on the details of how a Job Guarantee should be implemented. There are lots of options in terms of detail, and I'm aware of many of them, but not to the degree required to make a decision.
So if you want to contribute beyond promotion and discussion at this stage, you could start by reviewing Bill's paper and the work of other MMT economists, pulling out salient points for discussion and posting them here. That would form the basis of an ongoing policy discussion.
But asking for my opinion on things isn't really that constructive because I'm not an economist and I haven't actually read through in detail many of the academic papers that are available on the topic. I know it's the solution to economic malaise, and that it's possible, and that we can sell it politically, but beyond that you know as much as I do and there's not really much point you and I discussing it without citing actual sources.
Thanks!
I think we need a government budget framework that controls or disciplines government spending using primarily automatic stabilisers (like social security and JG payments) in addition to a basket of public services that are deemed to be either in the national interest (such as crucial R&D into food and energy security, education and health) or natural monpolies (such as public transport systems) -- this would serve to "discipline" government spending so it was non-inflatonary but at the same time not artificially constraining us to a "dollar taxed/dollars spent/dollar borrowed" model that we have now (I'm going to do a separate post on this in a the structural reform section on budget process reform ... )
However a lot of this stuff is written down in the literature on job guarantees and in particular in the paper referenced from Bill Mitchell at the start of this thread.
The process I want to pursue for policy discussions is to analyse academic or special interest group or government publications through the lens of our policy frameworks.
Rather than discussing this as a matter of opinion (ie. "do you think this? I think that") what would be most helpful is if you were able to read through Bill's entire paper, extract quotes here that would be relevant to the creation of a comprehensive Job Guarantee proposal, identify what points of contention there might be, look for competing academic work from other MMT economists (for example on the nature of jobs, the role of welfare etc.) and discuss things in that context.
That's the "real work" of policy development that needs to be done.
My primary focus at the moment is not policy development, but promotion. I created this forum as a space to being policy development discussions because some people both in the FB group and on Twitter started to ask really detailed policy discussion questions, and I think this the forum in which we'll engage with that over the long term.
Day to day, though, my work at the moment is primarily on getting the podcast out, writing to people, writing articles, engaging on social media, etc. I also engage on the forum here but, for example it will be a long time before I have the chance to read through Bill's paper in detail.
Until I've done that, I don't really have that definite an opinion on the details of how a Job Guarantee should be implemented. There are lots of options in terms of detail, and I'm aware of many of them, but not to the degree required to make a decision.
So if you want to contribute beyond promotion and discussion at this stage, you could start by reviewing Bill's paper and the work of other MMT economists, pulling out salient points for discussion and posting them here. That would form the basis of an ongoing policy discussion.
But asking for my opinion on things isn't really that constructive because I'm not an economist and I haven't actually read through in detail many of the academic papers that are available on the topic. I know it's the solution to economic malaise, and that it's possible, and that we can sell it politically, but beyond that you know as much as I do and there's not really much point you and I discussing it without citing actual sources.
Thanks!