Back to Full Employment

Back to Full Employment PDF Author: Robert Pollin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262017571
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States needs to try to implement full employment and how it can help the economy.

Back to Full Employment

Back to Full Employment PDF Author: Robert Pollin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262017571
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States needs to try to implement full employment and how it can help the economy.

Getting Back to Full Employment

Getting Back to Full Employment PDF Author: Dean Baker
Publisher: Center for Economic & Policy Research
ISBN: 9780615918358
Category : Full employment policies
Languages : en
Pages : 106

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Book Description
While most people intuitively know that low unemployment is important to job seekers, they may not realize that high levels of employment actually would make an enormous difference in the lives of large segments of the workforce who already have jobs. Particularly in an era of historically high wage and income inequality, many in the workforce depend on full employment labor markets, and the bargaining power it provides, to secure a fair share of the economy's growth. For the bottom third or even half of the wage distribution, high levels of employment are a necessary condition for improving wages, higher incomes, and better working conditions. This book is a follow-up to a book written a decade ago by the authors, The Benefits of Full Employment (Economic Policy Institute, 2003). It builds on the evidence presented in that book, showing that real wage growth for workers in the bottom half of the income scale is highly dependent on the overall rate of unemployment. In the late 1990s, when the United States saw its first sustained period of low unemployment in more than a quarter century, workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution were able to secure substantial gains in real wages. When unemployment rose in the 2001 recession, and again following the collapse of the housing bubble, most workers no longer had the bargaining power to share in the benefits of growth. The book also documents another critical yet often overlooked side effect of full employment: improved fiscal conditions (without mindless budget policies like the current sequestration). Finally, in this volume, unlike the earlier one, the authors present a broad set of policies designed to boost growth and get the unemployment rate down to a level where far more workers have a fighting chance of getting ahead.

Full Employment Abandoned

Full Employment Abandoned PDF Author: William Mitchell
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1848441428
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book by William Mitchell and Joan Muysken is both important and timely. It deals with the issue of the abandonment of full employment as an objective of economic policy in the OECD countries. It argues persuasively that macroeconomic policy has been restrictive over the recent, and not so recent past, and has produced substantial open and disguised unemployment. But the authors show how a job guarantee policy can enable workers, who would otherwise be unemployed, to earn a wage and not depend on welfare support. If such a policy is fully supported by appropriate fiscal and monetary programmes, it can create full employment with price stability, which the authors label as a Non-Accelerating-Inflation-Buffer Employment Ratio (NAIBER). This book is essential reading for any one wishing to understand how we can return to full employment as the normal state of affairs. Philip Arestis, University of Cambridge, UK This book dismantles the arguments used by policy makers to justify the abandonment of full employment as a valid goal of national governments. Bill Mitchell and Joan Muysken trace the theoretical analysis of the nature and causes of unemployment over the last 150 years and argue that the shift from involuntary to natural rate conceptions of unemployment since the 1960s has driven an ideological backlash against Keynesian policy interventions. The authors contend that neo-liberal governments now consider unemployment to be an individual problem rather than a reflection of systemic policy failure and that they are content to use unemployment as a policy instrument to control inflation and coerce the unemployed with work tests and compliance programmes rather than provide sufficient employment. They present a comprehensive theoretical and empirical critique of this policy approach, with a refreshing new framework for understanding modern monetary economies. The authors show that the reinstatement of full employment with price stability is a viable policy goal that can be achieved by activist fiscal policy through the introduction of a Job Guarantee. Full Employment Abandoned will appeal to graduate and postgraduate students and researchers of economics and politics with an interest in macroeconomic policy and the labour market, particularly unemployment and neo-liberal policy frameworks.

No More Work

No More Work PDF Author: James Livingston
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469630664
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

Back to Full Employment

Back to Full Employment PDF Author: Robert Pollin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262301091
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Why we should put full employment back on the national agenda and how we can summon the political will to achieve it. Full employment used to be an explicit goal of economic policy in most of the industrialized world. Some countries even achieved it. In Back to Full Employment, economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States—today faced with its highest level of unemployment since the Great Depression—should put full employment back on the agenda. There are good reasons to seek full employment, Pollin writes. Full employment will help individuals, families, and the economy as a whole, while promoting equality and social stability. Equally important, creating a full-employment economy can be joined effectively with two other fundamental policy aims: ending our dependence on fossil fuels and creating an economy powered by clean energy. Explaining views on full employment in macroeconomic theory from Marx to Keynes to Friedman, Pollin argues that the policy was abandoned in the United States in the 1970s for the wrong reasons, and he shows how it can be achieved today despite the serious challenges of inflation and globalization. Pollin believes the biggest obstacle to creating a full-employment economy is politics. Putting an end to the prevailing neoliberal opposition to full employment will require nothing less than an epoch-defining reallocation of political power away from the interests of big business and Wall Street and toward the middle class, working people, and the poor, while mounting a strong defense of the environment. In the end, achieving full employment will be a matter of political will: Can the United States make having a decent job a fundamental right?

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money PDF Author: John Maynard Keynes
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319703447
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

Raising Keynes

Raising Keynes PDF Author: Stephen A. Marglin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 921

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Book Description
Back to the future: a heterodox economist rewrites Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money to serve as the basis for a macroeconomics for the twenty-first century. John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money was the most influential economic idea of the twentieth century. But, argues Stephen Marglin, its radical implications were obscured by Keynes's lack of the mathematical tools necessary to argue convincingly that the problem was the market itself, as distinct from myriad sources of friction around its margins. Marglin fills in the theoretical gaps, revealing the deeper meaning of the General Theory. Drawing on eight decades of discussion and debate since the General Theory was published, as well as on his own research, Marglin substantiates Keynes's intuition that there is no mechanism within a capitalist economy that ensures full employment. Even if deregulating the economy could make it more like the textbook ideal of perfect competition, this would not address the problem that Keynes identified: the potential inadequacy of aggregate demand. Ordinary citizens have paid a steep price for the distortion of Keynes's message. Fiscal policy has been relegated to emergencies like the Great Recession. Monetary policy has focused unduly on inflation. In both cases the underlying rationale is the false premise that in the long run at least the economy is self-regulating so that fiscal policy is unnecessary and inflation beyond a modest 2 percent serves no useful purpose. Fleshing out Keynes's intuition that the problem is not the warts on the body of capitalism but capitalism itself, Raising Keynes provides the foundation for a twenty-first-century macroeconomics that can both respond to crises and guide long-run policy.

Full Employment in a Free Society (Works of William H. Beveridge)

Full Employment in a Free Society (Works of William H. Beveridge) PDF Author: William H. Beveridge
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317569784
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Beveridge defined full employment as a state where there are slightly more vacant jobs than there are available workers, or not more than 3% of the total workforce. This book discusses how this goal might be achieved, beginning with the thesis that because individual employers are not capable of creating full employment, it must be the responsibility of the state. Beveridge claimed that the upward pressure on wages, due to the increased bargaining strength of labour, would be eased by rising productivity, and kept in check by a system of wage arbitration. The cooperation of workers would be secured by the common interest in the ideal of full employment. Alternative measures for achieving full employment included Keynesian-style fiscal regulation, direct control of manpower, and state control of the means of production. The impetus behind Beveridge's thinking was social justice and the creation of an ideal new society after the war. The book was written in the context of an economy which would have to transfer from wartime direction to peace time. It was then updated in 1960, following a decade where the average unemployment rate in Britain was in fact nearly 1.5%.

Reconnecting to Work

Reconnecting to Work PDF Author: Lauren D. Appelbaum
Publisher: W.E. Upjohn Institute
ISBN: 0880994061
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Papers presented at a conference held on Apr. 1-2, 2011.

The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America

The Full Employment Horizon in 20th-Century America PDF Author: Michael Dennis
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350179159
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Through moments of social protest, policy debate, and popular mobilization, this book follows the campaign for economic democracy and the fight for full employment in the United States. Starting in the 1930s, Dennis explores its intellectual and philosophical underpinnings, the class struggle that determined the fate of legislation and the role of left-wing civil rights activists in its revival. Demonstrating how the campaign for full employment intersected with movements for women's liberation and civil rights, it explores how social groups and oppressed minorities interpreted and appropriated the promise of full employment. For many, full employment provided an indispensable path to racial and gender emancipation. In this book, Dennis uncovers the class dimensions and the resistance to full employment in the US. He demonstrates how the recurring debates over full employment consistently exposed the contradictions inherent in a capitalist society and challenged the assertion that an allegedly free enterprise system automatically generated employment for all.