My new podcast episode is out.

Bill Mitchell — The provenance of the Job Guarantee concept in MMT

As the public scrutiny of the body of work we now refer to as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) widens there is a lot of misinformation abroad that distorts or otherwise undermines what has been done to date. Most, but not all the misinformation or emphasis comes from those who attack our work. Their criticisms usually disclose an incomplete understanding of where MMT came from and what the core propositions and logic are. They stylise, usually using terms and constructs that are present in mainstream thinking, but inapplicable to an MMT way of thinking, and end up spitting out things like ‘printing money’ etc, which they think represents a devastating rejection of our work. As part of my own work, and I do this in liaison with Warren Mosler, I am interested in documenting the train of events that led to what we now call MMT. I love history and think it is very important in helping us understand things. So today I am continuing to examine archives to trace the provenance of key MMT concepts. And I am continuing to document the idea of a Job Guarantee, which is central to the MMT framework, despite many who claim to be MMTers thinking otherwise. I have noted in the recent press, claims that the origins of the buffer stock employment approach that became the Job Guarantee was the work of Hyman Minsky. Nothing could be further from the truth as you will see. It is important, in my view, to make the provenance very clear and that is what this blog post is about....

Essential reading (higher category than "must-read"). The MMT JG is probably the most misunderstood aspect of MMT. Hence, it is also the most mischaracterized.

It is a BUFFER STOCK (Bill Mitchell) based on an EMPLOYER OF LAST RESORT (Warren Mosler).

It is not Keynes. It is not Minsky. It did not come from Post Keynesianism. 

The BDE/ELR concept is original to MMT, being attributable initially to Mitchell and Mosler independently of each other. They worked out the together to put flesh on the bare bones. 

Randy Wray subsequently pointed out the similarity with Minsky, but the concept of a JG that Minsky proposed and the concept of the MMT JG are different.

The point is that:

1. The concept of a Job Guarantee that is now core MMT was entered into the discussion at that time by Warren Mosler (ELR) and myself (BSE). This was the provenance of the concept within MMT.

2. Minsky was never mentioned. Only his former PhD student, Randy Wray, once exposed to the BSE/ELR ideas, noted some overlap between the BSE/ELR approach and Minsky’s own, earlier ideas. But that was well into the PKT debate about the concept.

3. Anyone with knowledge of the history and the beginnings of the MMT work would not reasonably say that the reason that MMT considers a Job Guarantee to be an essential part of the body of work was due to anything that Hyman Minsky had written or said.
It is important to render history as accurately as we can.

This blog post is a key document of MMT on this matter. Bill is in the process of documenting the history of MMT, and I think it is safe to assume that this will eventually result in a formal document as an article or book. In the scholarly world, provenance is of the highest importance, and Bill documenting MMT history will be valuable in establishing priority. In the meanwhile, here it is.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The provenance of the Job Guarantee concept in MMT
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Bill Mitchell — A 10 per cent unemployment rate is not a “tremendous achievement” – it is a sign of total policy failure

It’s Wednesday, and a quiet day for writing blog posts for me. But I want to comment briefly on the latest economic news that sees the IMF claiming the Australian economy will contract by 6.7 per cent in 2020 and the Treasury estimates that the unemployment rate will rise to 10 per cent (double) by June this year. While this all sounds shocking, the emerging narrative in the media and among politicians is that this is sort of inevitable given the health crisis and the Government’s Job Keeper wage subsidy, which the Treasury claims will constrain the unemployment rate rise to 10 per cent rather than 15 per cent without it is a jolly decent thing for the politicians to have done and keeping the unemployment rate down to 10 per cent is a “tremendous achievement”. Well, apart from the wage subsidy leaving a million workers outside of any benefit and cutting wages for thousands who will receive the support, I fail to see why the unemployment rate should rise at all. The government has options: (a) wax lyrical about achieving a disaster – 10 per cent unemployment; or (b) create jobs via a Job Guarantee and see the unemployment rate fall to 2 per cent or so. For the neoliberals who run the place and their media supporters, a 10 per cent as a “remarkable achievement” and that is the TINA narrative they are pumping out to assuage the population. For the likes of yours truly, a 10 per cent unemployment rate is not a “tremendous achievement” – it is a sign of total policy failure. The government can always intervene and create sufficient jobs that will be of benefit to the society, can be designed to be safe in the current health context, and maintain the connection for most of us with paid work? Even if some of them would require the workers stay at home while being paid. For me that is a no-brainer....

To play the devil's advocate here, while implementating a JG would achieve "full employment" defined as a job offer fitted to every applicant at a wage that would set a floor under other wages, ostensibly at a "living wage" including benefits, this doesn't address the depth and breadth of the current crisis.

In the current context, the real danger in the dismal employment numbers is debt deflation as millions of people cannot meet their obligations and loans become "non-performing," that is, in default. Being at the minimum wage, an MMT JG is not going to prevent this. Governments need to do more.

Governments could declare the situation force majeure and suspend the terms of debt repayment, or, do what would be more effective — step in to make the payments. Or even better, foot the wage bill sot the conditions remain stable across the economy.

Bill has already considered this issue:

If you recall, a few weeks ago I did some rough modelling of my own which I presented in these blog posts:
1. “We need the state to bail out the entire nation” (March 26, 2020).
2. The government should pay the workers 100 per cent, not rely on wage subsidies (March 30, 2020).

But, but,  …what about the deficit and debt? If numbers bother, use "creative accounting," or just change the rules. This is the government, after all, and government accounting follows different rules anyway.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog

A 10 per cent unemployment rate is not a “tremendous achievement” – it is a sign of total policy failure
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Introductory Macroeconomics with a Job Guarantee — Peter Cooper

In some earlier posts, a job guarantee is added to an otherwise condensed income-expenditure model. This enables comparisons of steady states under different scenarios akin to the typical exercises conducted in introductory macroeconomics courses. What follows is a summary of the model, bringing together aspects that are dealt with in greater depth – but disparately – elsewhere on the blog, along with brief indications of how the model can be extended to include simple dynamics and short-run price behavior. Links to fuller explanations of various concepts are provided along the way....

heteconomist
Introductory Macroeconomics with a Job Guarantee
Peter Cooper

The Monetarist fantasy is over — Robert Skidelsky

Quite a good piece that pushes the MMT view without naming it.

Progressive Economy Forum
The Monetarist fantasy is over
Robert Skidelsky | Crossbench peer and Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University

Job Guarantee as a Policy Variable — Brian Romanchuk

The Job Guarantee is the most natural implementation of the concept of having the central government act as a price setter. By making an open bid for labour at a fixed price, an effective minimum wage is created in the economy, and it will eliminate almost all involuntary unemployment. This discussion will not cover the tricky question of implementation details, but will instead discuss how this fits in with the Monetary Monopoly model....

Bond Economics
Job Guarantee as a Policy Variable
Brian Romanchuk

Bill Mitchell — UBI–the hopeful not the surrender

I have long disagreed with Guy Standing about the solutions to unemployment. 20 years ago we crossed paths on panels and in the literature where he would argue that UBI was the way forward and I would argue that it was a neoliberal plot and that, instead, we needed to push for job creation. My view has always been that to surrender to the neoliberals on their claim that governments cannot generate sufficient jobs to satisfy the desires for work of the unemployed was a slippery slope. Standing continues to publish his fiction. In his latest Social Europe article (January 15, 2020) – Building a progressive alliance in Britain – he seeks to integrate UBI proposals with a recovery plan for British Labour. My view is that would not help Labour recover from the shots they fired into their own feet in the period before the December election by listening to the likes of Standing and those who advocated the Fiscal Credibility Rule and the reneging on the Brexit commitment. Standing’s aversion to job creation is in contradistinction with a recommendation from the Wetenschappelijke Raad Voor Het Regeringsbeleid (WRR or in English, The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy) to the Dutch government to deal with the challenges of achieving “good work”, in part, by introducing a ‘basic job’ which in my parlance means by introducing a Job Guarantee. They are motivated by a deep vein of social science and medical research that extols the virtues of work beyond its obvious income generation qualities. Pushing a UBI in the light of that research is just a pitiful bailout...

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
UBI – the hopeful not the surrender
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Bill Mitchell — A response to Greg Mankiw – Part 3

On the MMT JG and the buffer stock approach to controlling inflation. Important. For some reason, most critics ignore this approach, which is central to the MMT approach to both macroeconomics and policy formulation and policy space.

Interestingly, both Paul Krugman and Greg Mankiw, who come from different ideological perspectives (left and right respectively), but share much of the conventional paradigm (New Keynesianism), have difficulty coming to grips with what MMT economists are saying, apparently because they are trying to view it in terms of their own approach and conceptual frame instead of the very different MMT approach and framing.

This demonstrates the value of a pluralist and historical approach to the study of economics in learning to appreciate different perspectives and approaches on their own terms before critiquing them on the basis of one's own position. To do otherwise is an elementary mistake.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
A response to Greg Mankiw – Part 3
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

The Hill — Majority of voters support a federal jobs guarantee program

From 30 October but I just saw it. Harris Poll.

The Hill
Majority of voters support a federal jobs guarantee program

Peter Cooper — Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 5: Price Level

So far, in considering a simplified economy with a job guarantee, the focus has been on the demand-determined behavior of output and employment. Prices, in this exercise, have simply been taken as given on the grounds that they are not causally significant in the process. This approach does not require prices to remain constant, though, for given supply conditions, they may well do so over a fairly wide range of output for reasons to be discussed. Nor does it require that prices are necessarily unrelated to output; only that the direction of causation in any aggregate relationship between the two mostly runs from output to prices rather than the other way round. But once attention turns to the issue of price stability, which is of considerable interest to job-guarantee proponents, it becomes relevant to entertain a possible short-run relationship between output and prices. This will provide a basis for identifying potentially price-stabilizing aspects of a job guarantee in the next part of the series....

heteconomist
Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 5: Price Level
Peter Cooper

Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee–Part 4: Dynamic Stability — Peter Cooper

The model, in its present form, is short run in nature. It concerns an economy for which total employment, within-sector productivity and productive capacity are all taken as given. Variations in total output are achieved by workers transferring between two broad sectors that have differing productivity. In considering this economy, discussion has touched on aspects of a steady state and system behavior outside the steady state. It has been supposed, in the event of exogenous shocks, that the broader economy (sector b) drives the adjustment process through its reactions to excess demand or excess supply, with the job-guarantee program (sector j) absorbing or releasing workers as appropriate to maintain total employment at its given level. A tendency for the economy to move toward the steady state has been illustrated with reference to a Keynesian cross diagram (part 2) and a description of the growth behavior of actual output and demand whenever the system is outside the steady state (part 3). Attention now turns to the conditions under which this tendency to a steady state is operative, or, in other words, to the question of dynamic stability....

heteconomist
Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 4: Dynamic Stability
Peter Cooper

Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 3: Adjustment Process — Peter Cooper

The model as outlined so far implies particular dynamics. These dynamics are driven by the quantity response of the broader economy (sector b) to mismatches in supply and demand. With the size of the labor force, level of total employment, within-sector productivity and the economy’s productive capacity all taken as exogenously given, the quantity response of sector b requires a change in the sector’s level of employment. The response of sector b induces an inverse response from the job-guarantee sector (sector j), which adjusts as required to maintain full employment at all times. The resulting variations in the composition of employment between higher-productivity sector b and lower-productivity sector j enable the adjustment of total output to total demand....

heteconomist
Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 3: Adjustment Process
Peter Cooper

Peter Cooper — Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 2: Keynesian Cross Diagram

As a preliminary exercise, it may be instructive to modify the familiar Keynesian cross diagram to include the effects of a job guarantee within a simple short-run framework. The diagram includes two key schedules. The first is a 45-degree line showing all points for which actual expenditure equals actual income. The second is a line with lesser slope depicting the level of planned expenditure (total demand) at each level of income. Under appropriate conditions, the two schedules intersect at a steady-state level of income.…

Longish and wonkish.

heteconomist
Macro Dynamics with a Job Guarantee – Part 2: Keynesian Cross Diagram
Peter Cooper

The case for a guaranteed job — Robert Skidelsky

“Any government,” writes the economist and hedge fund manager Warren Mosler, “can achieve full employment by offering a public service job to anyone who wants one at a fixed wage.” Versions of this idea have received powerful endorsements from prominent Democratic politicians in the US, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has linked a government job guarantee to a Green New Deal. Moreover, versions of a job-guarantee program (JGP), more or less connected to green economics, have been implemented in Argentina, India, South Africa, and – whisper it quietly – Hungary under its illiberal populist leader, Viktor Orbán....

World Economic Forum
The case for a guaranteed job

Robert Skidelsky | Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, fellow of the British Academy in history and economics, member of the British House of Lords, and author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes

Originally published at Project Syndicate and picked up by World Economic Forum

Our Money: Modern Monetary Theory Must Dominate Democratic Debate — PR Newsletter

This Labor Day, Our Money will gather 500 participants to host a march for Full Employment and Economic Justice in commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement legacy of advocacy for a Federal Job Guarantee. The march will begin at the MLK Memorial in Washington DC at 11 am and end at the Marriner Eccles Building of the Federal Reserve around 2 pm. 

Our Money founder, Rev. Dr. Delman Coates, will use this opportunity to draw the connection for lay audiences between the Civil Rights struggle for Full Employment and Economic Justice, and the importance of understanding our public power of money creation, as illuminated by insurgent school of economic thought, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Dr. Coates will call on Congress to pass a Federal Job Guarantee, as well as hold hearings on MMT in order to allow the public to formally interrogate the implications of our public power....

Grassroots MMT.

Yahoo Finance
Our Money: Modern Monetary Theory Must Dominate Democratic Debate
PR Newsletter

Completing The Euro: The Euro Treasury And The Job Guarantee — Esteban Cruz-Hidalgo, Dirk H. Ehnts, Pavlina R. Tcherneva

Abstract
The problems with the design of the Eurozone came into focus when, late in 2009, several member nations– notably Greece – failed to refinance their government debt. The crisis that followed was not entirely asurprise. When the Euro was launched in 1999, many economists warned that the single currency was unworkable. Even Eurozone optimists argued that the Euro project would eventually need to be completed. More than 10 years after the crisis, unemployment rates remain elevated and continue to threaten the social, political and economic stability of the Eurozone. The institutional constraints of the single currency however preclude bold action to address these challenges. In this paper, we suggest that tackling the twin problems of the Eurozone – its institutional flaws and mass unemployment – could be addressed by creating a Euro Treasury that would finance a Job Guarantee program, which would eliminate mass unemployment, enhance price stability, and foster social and economic integration across Europe.

COMPLETING THE EURO: THE EURO TREASURY AND THE JOB GUARANTEE
Esteban Cruz-Hidalgo, Universidad de Extremadura, Dirk H. Ehnts European University of Flensburg, Pavlina R. Tcherneva Bard College

Scotland can have a job guarantee or the Fiscal Commission plan, but not both Richard Murphy

First, of course I welcome this.

Second, a job guarantee is a logical part of a Green New Deal, which offers work in every constituency by ensuring jobs are available everywhere to transform our green infrastructure, and most especially our housing.

Third, it has to then be noted that this policy is linked to modern monetary theory, which is the only current school of economic thought that makes full employment for those who want work its core objective.

And fourth, and inevitably, this policy is in opposition to the SNP’s commitment to Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission plan for Scotland....

Tax Research UK
Scotland can have a job guarantee or the Fiscal Commission plan, but not both
Richard Murphy | Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London; Director of Tax Research UK; non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics, and a member of the Progressive Economy Forum

Nicola Sturgeon indicates a Job Guarantee would be part of a Scottish Green New Deal — Sean Bell

The GND proposed in the US already includes a JG. Now it looks like Scotland is in play, too.

• Asked if a Job Guarantee would be part of her vision for a Scottish Green New Deal, [First Minister] Nicola Sturgeon says: “‘Yes’ is the short answer.”

• A Job Guarantee would involve the state acting as an ‘employer of last resort’ to the unemployed, and was last year proposed in the United States by Senator Bernie Sanders

• Finance Secretary Derek Mackay warns that more powers over employment law would need to be devolved

Common Space ((Scotland)
Nicola Sturgeon indicates a Job Guarantee would be part of a Scottish Green New Deal

Sean Bell

Bill Mitchell — The Green New Deal must wipe out precarious work and underemployment

In mapping out what I think are the essential aspects of a social transformation that we might call a Green New Deal, eliminating precarious work is one of the priorities – it is intrinsic to creating a more equitable society in harmony with nature. This aspect also calls in question the role of a Job Guarantee. Note the capitals – there is only one Job Guarantee but many jobs guarantees. I will explain today why the Job Guarantee will be an intrinsic part of the Green New Deal but by far a minor player in terms of the job opportunities that will be created by the socio-economic shift. Many commentators seem to think the Job Guarantee is sufficient for a Green New Deal. It is not and we need to understand its role in a monetary system to understand why....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The Green New Deal must wipe out precarious work and underemployment
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Bill Mitchell — ‘Sound finance’ prevents available climate solution with massive jobs potential

When the governments in the advanced nations abandoned full employment as an overarching macroeconomic objective, and instead, starting pursuing what I have called full employability, they stopped seeing unemployment as a policy target (to be minimised) and began using it as a policy tool to suppress inflation. As mass unemployment rose, the politics were massaged by the mainstream of my profession who claimed that the level of unemployment that constituted full employment had risen (this was the NAIRU era) and so there was really no problem. Governments adopted the neoliberal line that they ‘didn’t create jobs’ and had to target fiscal surpluses to ensure their position was ‘sustainable’. The costs in lost income and human suffering have been enormous – most people would not have any idea of the massive scale of these losses that accumulate day after day. Now, it seems, the ‘sound finance’ school is going a step further. We are probably facing an environmental emergency in the coming period (years, decades) but the question commentators keep asking is not what we can do about it but ‘how can we pay for it’? So ‘sound finance’ has already destroyed the lives of millions of people around the world as a result of mass unemployment and poverty, now it is turning its focus on the rest of us. Madness. Paradigm change has to come sooner rather than later.

No lack of funds for military, tax cuts for wealthy, corporate bailouts and donor pork.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
‘Sound finance’ prevents available climate solution with massive jobs potential
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia