Two weeks ago – it feels much longer now – I was up at UMass-Amherst to give a talk on the economic mobilizaiton of World War II and its lessons for the Green New Deal.
Here is an audio recording of the talk. Including Q&A, it’s about an hour and a half. Here are the slides that I used.
The big three lessons I draw are:
1. The more rapid the economic transformation that’s required, the bigger the role the public sector needs to take, in investment especially, and more broadly in bearing risk.
2. Output can be very elastic in response to stronger demand, much more so than is usually believed. There’s a real danger that over-conservative estimates of potential output will lead us to set our sights too low.
3. Demand conditions have major effects on income distribution. Full employment is an extremely powerful tool to shift income toward the lower-paid and to less-privelged groups, even in absence of direct redistribution.
EDIT: The underlying paper is being revised to update the lessons for the present in light of the fact that “the present” is now an acute public health crisis rather than an ongoing climate crisis. The first part of the new version is here. The rest will be forthcoming in the next couple weeks.
You can also listen to an interview with me on Doug Henwood’s Behind the News here.
Is there a download link for the audio? (I see the link for the slides, thx.) I’d prefer to listen to this on my MP3 player. FWIW, I’m not seeing a link to the audio (or to anything else about this talk, unfortunately) @ https://www.umass.edu/economics/workshops/polit-econ , nor is anything shown in the page (HTML) source; WordPress can be annoying that way 🙁
BTW, you might also want to replace
> Unfortunately, I am not sure the underlying paper will ever see the light of day.
with links to any/all of
* the Roosevelt Institute paper @ https://rooseveltinstitute.org/public-role-in-economic-transformation-lessons-from-world-war-ii/ (which I archived to https://web.archive.org/web/20200405182953/https://rooseveltinstitute.org/public-role-in-economic-transformation-lessons-from-world-war-ii/)
* your ‘Behind the News’ interview @ http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2020/20_04_02_16.mp3 (3rd of 3 in the episode, from 30:05 to end ~= 52:00)
That’s funny, the audio recording is right there in the post for me. Will try to fix. In the meantime, try this: http://jwmason.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/University-of-Massachusetts-Amherst-2.m4a
Have corrected wording as you suggest. I was feeling unduly pessimistic about paper when I posted this.