Keynes warned that ‘practical men’ were often in thrall to some dead economist. In fact many leading economists have agreed on the idea of guaranteed work.
‘Full and good employment’ and reviving the European ideal
The logic of a Euro-Keynesian recovery, towards socially useful full employment, leads inexorably to a rediscovery of wider European political ambition. Within the Democratic Party in the United States there is a flourishing of initiatives, promoted by Bernie Sanders, regarding ‘guaranteed work’. This recognises the urgency to concentrate every effort on the revival of public […]
Citizen’s Work Or Citizen’s Income
Le Monde has good reason to claim that the idea of a “universal basic income” (UBI) or “citizen’s income”, which in these times of unrestrained populism is reappearing in Italy and France, is “a false good idea”. The theory (an unconditional universal income guaranteed for all citizens of a given community) poses enormous problems of […]
Working Against The Jobless Society
The “endless” 2008 crisis is producing difficult growth, excessive unemployment, increasing inequalities. All this is stimulating interest in the recurrent tendencies in capitalism to “secular stagnation”. The term was coined in 1938 by Alvin Hansen, who argued that the depression of the Thirties was not so much a severe cyclical crisis as a symptom of […]