This is the seventh in a series of posts about Modern Monetary Theory, based on the text by Mitchell, Wray and Watts. If you have not seen the earlier posts, I recommend that you start at the beginning.
The goal of full employment
The authors argue for full employment on both economic and ethical grounds. Enabling everyone who wants a job to get one maximizes national economic output, providing more goods and services to distribute. Failing to do so not only hurts unemployed individuals and their families, but does lasting damage to economy and society in general:
Persistently high unemployment not only undermines the current welfare of those affected and slows down the growth rate in the economy below its potential, but also reduces the medium- to longer-term capacity of the economy. The erosion of skills and lack of investment in new capacity means that future productivity growth is likely to be lower than if the economy was maintained at higher rates of activity.
The authors are very critical of the dominant trend in recent economic policy, which is to tolerate unemployment while giving priority to fighting inflation. Policymakers came to accept unemployment rates far above the 2% or lower that was normal in the mid-twentieth century. High unemployment has also been accompanied by underemployment, as many workers have been unable to work as many hours as they would like, and also labor force withdrawals, especially by men. The official unemployment rate does not tell the whole story.
The inflation-fighting part has worked pretty well. Sluggish economic growth and high unemployment weaken the bargaining position of labor and help keep wages down. In turn, low labor costs and weak consumer demand keep firms from raising prices. In general, “the use of unemployment as a tool to suppress price pressures has, based on the OECD experience since the 1990s, been successful.”
The authors are troubled by the injustice of making a minority of the population bear the costs of a weak economy. “Joblessness is usually concentrated among groups that suffer other disadvantages: racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, younger and older individuals, women (especially female heads of households with children), people with disabilities, and those with lower educational attainment.” I would add that the injustice is compounded if those who do make income gains in this economy are mainly the wealthiest 1%. The benefits of price and currency stability are somewhat more widely shared, but “it is doubtful that a case can be made for their status as a human right on par with the right to work.”
The Job Guaranty
Not all countries experienced high unemployment after the end of the postwar economic boom. Some, such as Norway, did more to insure that everyone who wanted to work could find a job.
The idea of the Job Guaranty is fundamentally simple. Since full employment is such a social and economic good, the public sector should take up the slack by employing those who cannot find jobs in the private sector.
“Private firms only hire the quantity of labour needed to produce the level of output that is expected to be sold at a profitable price. Government can take a broader view to include promotion of the public interest, including the right to work.”
The Job Guaranty is also known as the “employment buffer stock approach.” A stock of public jobs provides a buffer to protect the economy from a weak private sector. Government acts to stabilize employment, spending to hire more labor when the private sector is weak, and reducing spending and public employment when it is strong. That would also have a stabilizing effect on national income and consumption.
The authors suggest that the wages paid in the Job Guaranty program would function like a national minimum wage, since they should be low enough to “avoid disturbing the private sector wage structure when the JG is introduced.” It wouldn’t compete with the private sector enough to drive up wages in general. On the other hand, they also want the wages to express “the aspiration of the society in terms of the lowest acceptable standard of living.” They do not discuss how these goals might be in conflict, but advocates of a “living wage” generally regard today’s minimum wage as too low.
Price stability
Proponents of the Job Guaranty expect it to be less inflationary than traditional Keynesian policies, which recommend government spending in general to stimulate the economy. When government increases its general spending, that runs the risk of driving prices up by competing with private firms for labor and other resources. However:
There can be no inflationary pressures arising directly from a policy where the government offers a fixed wage to any labour that is unwanted by other employers. The JG involves the government buying labor off the bottom, in the sense that employment at the minimum wage does not impose pressure on the market-sector wage structure.
Government would not be involved in a bidding war with private companies for labor, since it would only be hiring labor for which there was no other demand.
The benefits would ramify throughout the economy because of the growth in public works, income, and consumer demand. That should stimulate some expansion in the private sector as well, to meet the increased demand. Private firms could get the additional workers they needed by hiring them away from the Job Guaranty program. That would be fine with the government, which would no longer need to employ them. The program simply absorbs unneeded labor until it is needed again, but does nothing to bid up the price of labor. It supplies a boost to aggregate demand only when there is enough unused capacity in the economy to respond to it. So there is no reason to expect either cost-push or demand-pull inflation as a result of the JG itself.
Effects on public deficit and private surplus
The expected economic effects of a Job Guaranty follow from the macroeconomic relationships described earlier.
GNP = C + I + G + CAB [see MMT 3]
Gross National Product = Consumption + Investment + Government Spending + Current Account Balance
(T – G) + (S – I) + (-CAB) = 0 [see MMT 4]
These three sector financial balances add to zero:
T – G = Government balance of tax revenue minus spending
S – I = Private sector balance of saving minus investment
-CAB = External sector balance expressed as the current account surplus held by trading partners
Let’s start from the present U.S. situation, where financial surpluses in the private sector and the external sector are balanced by a large government deficit.
Let’s hold the external balance constant, so we can concentrate on the effects of a Job Guaranty on the domestic sectors, public and private.
When the Job Guaranty program starts:
- G rises
- GNP rises even more than G, because of the consumption multiplier
- Government deficit rises
- Private sector surplus rises
We are assuming that the increase in G is not offset by an increase in taxes. That would keep the increase from showing up in disposable income and block the multiplier effect on consumption. Since G rises but T doesn’t, the deficit (T – G) rises.
According to Modern Monetary Theory, the sovereign government can issue currency to spend beyond its revenue, and this public debt is sustainable. The government can also borrow money by issuing more treasury bonds without “crowding out” private borrowing, as is often alleged. That’s because the private surplus must increase in tandem with the public debt in order for the sector balances to offset. The mechanism by which this happens is the effect of Government spending on Saving due to the saving multiplier. Some of each additional dollar of income is saved, so S rises, and the surplus S – I must rise as much as the deficit T – G, other things being equal.
At the end of MMT 4, I expressed some concern that surplus savings not invested in real productive assets could lead to excess speculation and financial instability. This text does not address that possibility, but it makes me nervous about growing public deficits and private surpluses indefinitely.
Hopefully, the Job Guaranty program stimulates the general economy. As aggregate demand rises, the private sector needs to hire away more of the labor in the Job Guaranty program, so the program can be scaled back. But in order to sustain GNP at a high level, another variable in the GNP equation must increase to offset any reduction in government spending. Presumably that would be Investment, since the firms hiring more labor will also be providing more workplaces, equipment and expanded inventories. That leads to this optimistic scenario:
As private sector demand picks up:
- G falls, but I rises
- GNP is sustained at full-employment level
- Government deficit falls
- Private surplus falls
Private surplus (S – I) falls because of the rise in investment, which absorbs more of the uninvested saving. I also think that when the private sector is strong, it might be a good time to reduce the public deficit and private surplus by raising taxes on the wealthy, but the text does not get into that.
Necessary but not sufficient?
I like the text’s proposal for a Job Guaranty. I accept the authors’ argument that increasing public debt to fund it is not necessarily bad, since public debt is more sustainable than private debt. I would hope, though, that a period of expansionary fiscal policy might get the economy to a place where public deficits and other sector imbalances could actually be reduced.
One potential problem with the optimistic scenario is that investment in new technologies might displace too much labor, throwing millions of workers back into the Job Guaranty program. As private sector demand picks up and the private labor force moves toward full employment, that would strengthen the bargaining power of labor, according to the author’s conflict theory (see MMT 6). Ideally, investment in new technologies would raise worker productivity and justify wage increases. That would be a long overdue boost in productivity, which has been rather stagnant lately. On the other hand, automated and artificially intelligent systems could replace too many workers, especially those with limited education and technical skills. One can imagine a large underclass of otherwise unemployable workers stuck in minimum-wage jobs in the Job Guaranty program.
In order to develop human potential to the fullest, which is one of the text’s goals, government may need to spend on human capital development as well as the Job Guaranty, although the same program would have some effect on both. General spending to promote education, training, health care, and so forth are also needed.
Writers such as Martin Ford in The Rise of the Robots envision a massive welfare system to support people whose labor is no longer needed. I agree with the authors of Modern Monetary Theory and Practice that paying people not to work is a tremendous waste of human resources. “Providing welfare rather than work to those who want to work is not only an admission of defeat (the labour market fails to provide enough jobs), but also wastes resources and generates social costs.”
I accept the fundamental premise of this economics that “the most important resource in any economy is labour.” I want to enable people to do marketable work of some kind, although new technologies could raise productivity to the point where they wouldn’t need to devote many hours to it. I think that goal is best achieved through a balance of public and private investment. I hardly need to point out that little of this is likely until the present regime is history.
Beneath the Surface 