(Earlier this week, I gave a virtual presentation at an event organized by the Roosevelt Institute and the Green New Deal Network. Virtual events are inferior to live ones in many, many ways. But one way they are better, is that they are necessarily on video, and can be shared. Anyway, here is 25 minutes on why the economic situation calls for even more spending than the (surprisingly ambitious) proposals from the Biden administration, and also on why full employment shouldn’t be seen as an alternative to social justice and equity goals but as the best way of advancing them.)
Tag: WWII
Talk on the Economic Mobilization of World War II
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.