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Economics

Het is de hoogste tijd voor een werkgelegenheidsplan

Nov 13, 2020 Gordon Brown and Robert Skidelsky

EDINBURGH/LONDEN – In het kielzog van de COVID-19-pandemie maken zowel de Amerikaanse als de Europese economie zich op voor banenschepping op grote schaal. De nieuwe Amerikaanse president Joe Biden heeft beloofd 700 miljard dollar te zullen investeren in de industrie en de innovatie, plus 2 biljoen dollar in een ʻBiden Green Dealʼ ter bestrijding van de klimaatverandering en ter bevordering van schone energie. Intussen heeft Duitsland jaren van zuinigheid achter zich gelaten door een Europees herstelfonds van 750 miljard euro te steunen. Net als Frankrijk zal Duitsland daarnaast in 2021 vasthouden aan zijn eigen nationale werkgelegenheidsprogramma.

De minister van Financiën van Groot-Brittannië, Rishi Sunak, is daarentegen in gebreke gebleven. In maart dit jaar hadden velen verwacht dat Groot-Brittannië een V-vormig herstel zou ondergaan. Toen dit vooruitzicht vervaagde, werd duidelijk dat de reddingsoperatie van Sunak vergezeld zou moeten gaan van een levensvatbaar herstelplan.

De consensusvisie is dat zowel Groot-Brittannië als de wereldeconomie in 2021 kleiner zullen zijn dan in 2019. Het Internationale Monetaire Fonds verwacht dat de wereldeconomie 6,5 procent kleiner zal zijn dan vóór de COVID-19-crisis was voorspeld, met een erfenis van werkloosheid die minstens het dubbele is van de norm van vóór de pandemie.

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Gordon Brown

Writing for PS since 2010
102 Commentaries

Gordon Brown, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, is UN Special Envoy for Global Education.

Robert Skidelsky

Writing for PS since 2003
210 Commentaries

Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, was a non-executive director of the private Russian oil company PJSC Russneft from 2016 to 2021. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. He is the author of The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning (Allen Lane, 2023).

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Oliver Kovacs Nov 15, 2020

This opinion does not sound very convincing simply because it neglects what is going on in the developed world: employment-saving technological revolution via automation/robotisation/digitalisation (especially in the shadow of COVID-19 serving as a new push into that direction).

Two questions arise: 1) Could the state become a development state by expanding its size in an effort to fulfil the principle of inclusive growth (potentially with productive works) either in the public sector, or the private sector? 2) Or shall we just go for grounding skill-development for placements requiring chiefly creative and social skills where the risk of automation appearing so far to be infinitesimally low?
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John Alexander Nov 15, 2020

One can read all the way through an article like this, manifestly intelligent in many respects, without seeing any serious reference to a persistent fact: the tax regimes we know are designed to facilitate an upward flow of wealth from the less affluent to the aristocracy of the moment. Such articles invariably draw some attention to the matter of “stimulating” an economy, while the term “economy” classically denotes a continuum involving cooperation and harmony as opposed to one based largely on competition and superfluous production. Cooperation and harmony are insusceptible of stimulation. Where employment is concerned, the promises go on and on, decade after decade, without any reference to two facts readily apparent to any mathematician. First, regressive taxation, in all its multifarious forms, is a serious impediment to employment. The philosophical case for entirely progressive taxation is watertight. Second, the tax regimes we have known all our lives, and which will continue as surely as night follows day, are a serious impediment to three things: a decent job for the weaker citizen, the demise of a religion according to which the purpose of life is to consume, and a set of rational initiatives aimed at preventing the collapse of civilization.
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Christopher Harris Nov 14, 2020

I re-read Kalecki's 1943 paper on the politics of full employment the other day, very instructive. Not only does Kalecki anticipate everything the current MMT crowd have to say about creating money out of thin air, using it to create jobs and cancelling it by way of taxation, but also makes the point that the question of who gets to make use of the new money is 100% political: a zero-sum struggle between rentiers and workers (or rentiers and renters, to make it rhyme).

I suspect that now that governments are printing money hand over fist to keep the rentiers' assets from imploding, things are going to get hot in the streets.

Here in NZ for example, normally thought of as the most stable country in the world, there's actually a total divide between mostly Pakeha (white) and Asian landowners whose asset values are the main object of government support (median house prices in Auckland have just hit NZ $1 million or US $ 650,000, "too high to fall"), and indigenous populations numbering about a quarter of the population, mostly poor and renting in their own country.

Sixty organisations led by Auckland Action Against Poverty have joined a struggle for re-orientation of the up to $150 billion of helicopter money mostly earmarked, apparently, for propping up real estate and the banks, toward a people's bailout and a GND that includes putting the unemployed to work building houses on a Swedish scale. But the gov't is resisting any such idea as absolutely unthinkable and not for turning, even though it's what previous Labour govt's have also done in NZ from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Jacinda Ardern's politics of kindness has so far not extended toward the questioning the core tenets of an actually really naive version of neoliberalism, in other words. Instead, the poor have been lectured on how million dollar house prices ultimately benefit all by maintaining stability and the purchasing power of the better off, and that's why there's not going to be much money for anything else.

AAAP, meanwhile, is doing its best to destabilise this stability. It has upped the rhetorical ante on what it calls the 'War on the Poor' and others 'The Quiet War' and the 'Struggle without End', all agreeing in NZ there is effectively a war between the rich and the poor (or Pakeha and Maori), a continuation of the shooting wars of the nineteenth century by other means, and that in this context, a people's bailout or GND would put a final end to a time-expired regime of post-British colonial rule and the lingering oppressions of Maori and Pacific Islanders. Which, for Maori at least, basically consist of being renters in a country they used to own before the British turned up, their rent constantly being put up as house prices rise.

In short, there are parallels with 1960s civil rights struggles, including the one that developed in Northern Ireland. This is a history that rhymes and it's rhyming again.

The New Zealand situation is of course a post-colonial one with all the rawness and rough edges that that implies. But the thought that relentless QE for the bankers and the real estate sector and no-can-do on a GND because the bankers and the real estate sector won't allow it, might eventually trigger a legitimacy crisis of the state on a par with such landmark years as 1919 or 1932 or 1968, is a thought that could still apply to other, 'older' countries as well.
- Christopher Harris Nov 14, 2020
  
  PS I do not mean "crowd" in any undiplomatic sense. I like to think that I am part of the same crowd myself! Furthermore, the need for cancellation of the additional money by taxes applies only once unused capacity has been mopped up, of course. Plus, there is much to say in terms of updating Kalecki to a more FIRE context as he has usually been read in terms of labour relations in manufacturing industry. I'd have composed things better if this were more than a quick comment.
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Michael Public Nov 14, 2020

Ok - fine. But how about instead of letting the money flow as loans to rent seekers and speculators, we for once push it out to real entrepreneurs and single mothers? "No chance of that" I can almost hear you mumble, with a barely concealed smirk on the lips.
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