Thread by @doctorow

There's a terrible paradox at work in the mass unemployment created by the pandemic. We know that there is more than enough work for every human alive today and for the next 2-300 years, addressing the climate emergency.

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That was true before the pandemic. What's changed is that tens of millions of workers in the USA and hundreds of millions worldwide have lost their jobs, and there is no demand from the private sector for their labor.

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Our system relies on markets to create jobs, on the grounds that this is the most efficient way to employ people.

Today, millions of people face long-term unemployment (with the physical and mental-health tolls that come with it).

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And we DESPERATELY need their work to save our planet and our species.

How is it "efficient" to leave them idle while the planet burns?

It's a subject I've been contemplating in fiction for a long time. It's at the center of the novel I'm writing.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/pro…

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But don't listen to me, listen to an economist, like @ptcherneva, whose forthcoming "The Case for a Jobs Guarantee," lays out a clear, plausible case for giving a job to everyone who wants one, doing the care and rehabilitation we desperately need.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/05/the…

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I'm not the only sf writer who's been inspired by Tcherneva's vision. My colleague Kim Stanley Robinson's latest @business column lays out the case for a jobs guarantee with the poesy for which he is justly famed.

bloomberg.com/amp/news/artic…

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Robinson rightly sees the threat of automation-driven unemployment as hacky science fiction masquerading as economic analysis: "Most jobs require a flexibility and creativity that only humans can bring to the task."

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"And even if some of the jobs offered by government were make-work, such as the Works Progress Administration when it was building hiking trails and post offices in the 1930s, so what?"

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Robinson connects the Jobs Guarantee to #ModernMonetaryTheory and the premise that deficit spending doesn't create inflation - what creates inflation is too much money chasing the same goods and services.

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"If [economists] think the [economy's] goal is other than prosperous people living in balance with a healthy biosphere, they need to make that case—or think again."

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Governments presiding over 25-40% unemployment don't last. They are so unstable that they collapse, sometimes taking the nation with them. When the pandemic is over, we're going to do SOMETHING, or we're going to dissolve into chaos.

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The right wing version of this is workfare, AKA forced labor.

The progressive version is the Jobs Guarantee: care and remediation jobs created in consultation with local communities, paying a living wage and good benefits.

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The #FightFor15 is important, but the idea that this would set the minimum wage at $15/h is wrong. In the absence of a Jobs Guarantee, the true minimum wage is $0/hour. That's how much you earn if no one wants to buy your labor.

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A living minimum wage puts some pressure on the worst employers to improve their workers' lives, but at the end of the day, those employers have a counteroffer for their workers: how about $0/hour?

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A Jobs Guarantee - like the other guarantees the federal government offers, backing loans, guaranteeing profits to contractors, buying surplus agricultural product - would put a real floor on the living conditions of workers.

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If we're willing to guarantee a minimum price for cheese, why not human labor?

eof/