This is Part 7 of my on-going examination of the concept of ‘duty to work’ and how it was associated with the related idea of a ‘right to work’. Today, I go back in history (again) to discuss a literature that influenced the evolution of my own early advocacy of a Job Guarantee. We see how I considered developments in the early C19th which established very clearly the responsibility of the government to act as an ’employer of last resort’ could be integrated with the buffer stock literature (which analysed the use of commodity buffer systems) in C20th to provide a coherent buffer stock full employment capacity in our modern economies. In Part, this establishes where the Job Guarantee idea, that is now central to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) came from – at least, in terms of my early contribution to that body of work.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Tracing the roots of progressive views on the duty to work – Part 7
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
3 comments:
I rather doubt the "duty to work" idea stems from the voluminous literature examined by Bill Mitchell and others. I mean the idea that there is some sort of obligation on able bodied adults of working age to pull their weight is obvious to the least intelligent and uneducated section of the human race, isn't it?
If you are referring to economists, the answer is obviously not.
Does Bill know there is a shutdown?
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