Full employment – an abandoned idea and its renaissance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15584/nsawg.2021.4.1Keywords:
full employment, job guarantee, functional finance, stabilization of prices, ungrowthAbstract
This article deals with the recovery of the idea of full employment. Its principal aim is to gather evidence that this idea has new functions in the present social context and that the main problems of the full employment policy have reasonably well founded solutions. The method of this text is to analyse the social meaning of economic theories. In every analysis of full employment, the politics of inflation pressure seems to be the main and unresolved problem. This pressure is biggest as the economy nears full employment. The first proponents of full employment policies, including W. H. Beveridge and A. P. Lerner, knew this problem very well. Contemporary followers of full employment policies also endorse the Lernerian concept of functional finance. However, they recommend an institutional change and reject the Keynesian discretionary macroeconomic policy. Their proposition is the Job Guarantee Programme: employing all of the willing people without a job in the public sector and paying them a universal decent wage. The job guarantee is an old idea in a new form and a new context. In times of economic decline, a Job Guarantee Programme delivers a more egalitarian organisation of society and a greater level of equality instead of doubtful prospects for economic growth.
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