People, Power, and Profits by Joseph E. Stiglitz

Author:Joseph E. Stiglitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

A guaranteed job for all who are willing to work

Most of the time, the measures described so far will enable the economy to achieve full employment. Still, it is far from certain that that will be the case in the economy we are moving toward. So strong has been the influence of “market ideology” in our thinking that most economists believe that full employment should and can be achieved relying largely on the private sector, if only the government exercises fiscal and monetary policy correctly. But what happens if that is not so?

There is an alternative: government hiring workers. In twenty-first-century America, we should recognize a new right—the right of every person able and willing to work to have a job. And if the market fails, and if our fiscal and monetary policies fail, the government needs to step into the breach. People care about economic security, and the increase in security that this backstop would provide would be of inestimable value. Besides, there is much work that needs doing. Many of our schools are dilapidated, in need of repair, or at least of painting. Our cities could be cleaned up and beautified.33 As we saw earlier, it is a shame that there is work that needs to be done and people wanting to do that work, and yet our economic and financial system is failing both our society and these individuals.

India has provided such a guarantee (of one hundred days of work) to its rural citizens willing to do unskilled manual labor, and some fifty million Indians a year have taken advantage of the scheme. If a poor country like India can afford it, so can the United States. There, it’s had a further advantage—it has helped drive up rural wages, reducing extreme poverty; there’s a good chance that it would help drive up wages at the bottom in the US, and that would in turn help reduce inequality.34

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