employer if you had a living-wage alternative. You could get a starter job before moving on to other opportunities, and save yourself the frustration of being rejected time and again by employers who may not like your sparse résumé. You would be able to avoid the stress of applying for food stamps and other government programs, because you have a living-wage job and can make ends meet. We are here just scratching the surface of the difference a Job Guarantee could make to the lives of the millions of people behind the unemployment and underemployment numbers.
But maybe these stories don’t resonate. It just sounds too good to be true. Isn’t there something called the “natural unemployment rate”? What can the government really do about it? Can it even create jobs and, if it tried, wouldn’t it distort market incentives? Maybe you worry that people wouldn’t work as hard if they weren’t afraid of being unemployed. Or that the program would ruin productivity. And how much would it cost? Isn’t it very expensive to hire millions of people? All of these concerns and more are addressed in the following pages.
The economics of unemployment is bad economics. One need not share the personal distress unemployed people and their families face to understand that hiring those willing to work is a much better economic approach than the one we have at present. Reaching that understanding is the task of the next chapter.
Notes
1 1. The broader measure would include people who want to work but are not counted because they did not look for work in the survey week, or those who work part-time because they cannot find full-time work. For details see, e.g., Flavia Dantas and L. Randall Wray, “Full Employment: Are We There Yet?,” Levy Economics Institute, Public Policy Brief No. 142, 2017.
2 2. Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “Reorienting Fiscal Policy: A Bottom-up Approach,” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 37(1), 2014: 43–66.
3 3. T. Piketty and E. Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(1), 2019 [2003]: 1–39.
4 4. Nina McCollum, “What I’ve Learned About Unemployment and Being Poor After Applying for 215 Jobs,” HuffPost, July 26, 2019.
5 5. Alexia Fernández Campbell, “A Loophole in Federal Law Allows Companies to Pay Disabled Workers $1 an Hour,” Vox, May 3, 2018.
6 6. Liz Goodwin, “Job Listings Say the Unemployed Need Not Apply,” Yahoo News, July 26, 2011.
7 7. “A Profile of the Working Poor, 2017: BLS Reports,” US Bureau of Labor Statistics, United States Department of Labor, April 2019.
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