#Pavlina Tcherneva

[lemoncholy-stars]

the love of my life is a middle aged economist lady actually

[azspot]

Look, we always end up using the public purse to pay for joblessness. Right now, we use it to pay for unemployment. We could use it to pay for employment instead. I came to the Jobs Guarantee from a macroeconomic perspective — the realization that we were using unemployed people as a kind of “buffer stock” to control inflation. Having unemployed people means that when the economy grows, those people would be there to take those jobs. But what if we could use employment as a buffer stock? That’s obviously the superior option. I realized that you couldn’t just argue about this as a macroeconomic policy, you have to bring in the human rights framework, the moral framework. You have to think about the kind of neglect, the health effects, the pain that unemployment inflicts on people who want to work.

Pavlina Tcherneva

[ferrolano-blog]

Pavlina R. Tcherneva: Trump vence mientras los estadounidenses votan por políticas progresistas... los votantes expresaron su descontento con cómo iban las cosas y votaron medidasfavorables a los trabajadores, especialmente en los estados “colorados”... votaron por bajas por enfermedad retribuidas, por aumentar el salario mínimo, por instalaciones renovables, que los colegios privados no recibieran dinero público, y apoyaron abrumadoramente el derecho al aborto... Nos están diciendo que necesitan un alivio; quieren bajas retribuidas, quieren que los fondos públicos se destinen a sus necesidades inmediatas: atención al paciente, escuelas públicas, agua potable... por un instante, durante la crisis del COVID, los estadounidenses se dieron cuenta de lo que era posible: recibieron atención médica universal, sin condiciones; consiguieron quitas en los préstamos estudiantiles y un alivio de otras deudas y en el pago del alquiler; los padres recibieron una asignación universal por hijo. Todo fue posible y luego todo desapareció. Empero, los estadounidenses querían y necesitaban más... El nivel de vida de las familias estadounidenses lleva cayendo mucho tiempo: la vivienda, la educación y la atención médica han sido inalcanzables de forma consistente. Los elevados recibos de la compra que las familias estadounidenses observan a diario no han hecho más que añadir sal a la herida, aunque hayan caído las mediciones oficiales de inflación... "Somos dos padres con tres maestrías entre nosotros y tres hijos... Los alimentos no son asequibles, el cuidado de los niños no es asequible, nuestros impuestos sobre la propiedad siguen aumentando, pero ni siquiera podemos pagar el mantenimiento básico de la casa. Nuestras reparaciones de automóviles nos ponen al límite... Vivimos de nómina en nómina y no podemos permitirnos ni el ocio ni los “caprichos” de antes"

[fadingsunsjvj]

Episode 14: The Job Guarantee & Social Justice (w/ Pavlina Tcherneva)

[13thgenfilm]

📣 There's still time to grab tickets to come celebrate the world premiere of FINDING THE MONEY at the Woodstock Film Festival this weekend, screening on Sat, Sept 30th and Sun, Oct 1st.

🎟️ Tickets: 👉 https://tinyurl.com/FTMlink

Director Maren Poitras and executive producer Marc Smolowitz will be in attendance for a Q&A at both screenings, in addition to many other experts from the film including Stephanie Kelton, L. Randall Wray, Pavlina R. Tcherneva and more.

We hope to see you at a screening this weekend … and if not there, stay close for more festival announcements - we’re coming to a city near you soon!

[endquire]

Episode 238 - RP Book Club Presents: Pavlina Tcherneva's The Case For a Job Guarantee

[cosmologicalhedgehogephemera]

https://museum.care/the-great-debt-debate-q-a/ Cited from the website: “The First Fight between Michael Hudson and Thomas Piketty about the nature of Debt was held on the 10th anniversary of the edition of David Graeber’s 5000 Years of Debt.

Michael Hudson and Thomas Piketty were seeking answers to the burning questions of our time. The fight had so many rounds that we didn’t have time to answer a lot of questions from the public.

So in the spirit of a boxing match, we’re going to have our combatant Michael Hudson conduct a post-match debrief, where the public can ask questions and get answers.

Let’s discuss the tactics and strategies suggested in the Fight.  Let’s explore the way out of the mess we’re in together!

Meet Steve Keen, Michael Hudson, Pavlina Tcherneva and Astra Taylor!” I thought this was really informative and interesting. I think some of the perspectives being put forth here are very useful, moving forward...

[herringbookshelf]

Grateful to have gotten my degree in economics at Bard College where this was standard training among the institutionalist economists I studied under including Pavlina Tcherneva, mentioned here.

Modern Monetary Theory says the world still hasn’t come to terms with the death of the gold standard in 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared that the dollar was no longer convertible into gold. In the modern era of “fiat” currency, MMT says, the U.S. and other big economies no longer need to worry about having enough gold to back their paper money, so they’re free to print however much they need.

MMT claims to be the legitimate heir to the theories of Britain’s John Maynard Keynes, who created the field of macroeconomics during the Great Depression. Keynes coined the term “paradox of thrift.” His insight was that while any single household can dig itself out of a hole by cutting spending when its income falls, the economy as a whole cannot. One household’s spending is another’s income, so if everybody cuts back, no one gets paid. What you get then is a depression—a situation only government can fix because, unlike the private sector, it can afford to spend freely, putting money in people’s pockets and thus getting the economy back on track.

In MMT’s reckoning, Keynesianism was gutted in the following decades by successors such as Paul Samuelson, who unrealistically tried to make economics like physics, playing down the role of fundamental uncertainty. MMTers haven’t endeared themselves to the mainstream by referring to that school of thought as “bastard Keynesianism,” a coinage of the late British economist Joan Robinson.

MMT also draws on the “functional finance” work of the Russian-born British economist Abba Lerner, who wrote in the 1940s that government should spend what’s required to achieve its goals, deficits be damned. Later, Britain’s Wynne Godley developed the concept of sectoral balances, which focuses on the accounting truth that when the government runs a deficit, the nongovernment sector must run a surplus, and vice versa.

MMT rejects the modern consensus that economies should be steered primarily by the raising and lowering of interest rates. MMTers believe that the natural rate of interest in a world of fiat money is zero and that pegging it higher is a giveaway to the investor class. They say tweaking interest rates is ineffectual because businesses make investment decisions based on prospects for growth, not the cost of money.

MMTers argue that economies should be guided by fiscal policy—government spending and taxation. They want a nation’s central bank to do the bidding of its treasury. So when the treasury needs money, the central bank accommodates it with a keystroke—creating base money from thin air by crediting the treasury’s checking account. The new textbook says that today, governments “tend to run unduly restrictive fiscal policy stances so as not to contradict the monetary policy stance.”

MMT says that, contrary to appearances, banks don’t make loans out of deposits. Rather, they make loans based on the demand for borrowing, then the borrowers stash the proceeds in the bank. Anyone they write a check to simply makes a deposit in another bank. The bottom line is that loans create deposits rather than deposits creating loans. This is one aspect of MMT that even some conservative central bankers—including those at Germany’s Bundesbank—agree with.

To stabilize employment, MMT would add a federally funded, locally administered job guarantee. Government would employ more people in slumps than in booms. Pavlina Tcherneva of Bard College’s Levy Economics Institute is refining the plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist from the Bronx who’s in her first term in Congress, supports the job guarantee and says MMT should be ��a larger part of our conversation.”MMT challenges a core principle of conventional economics, which is that an increase in budget deficits will tend to raise interest rates, all else equal. Just the opposite, it says, sounding a bit like the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland. When the government spends more, the private sector gets the money and puts it in the banking system. With more money in the system and no increase in demand for it, interest rates will tend to fall, not rise, MMT says. That is, unless the government chooses to soak up reserves by selling bonds, which it doesn’t have to do.

The reason the government doesn’t need to sell treasury securities, or levy taxes, to spend money is that the central bank, under the control of the treasury, can pay for everything by conjuring up electronic money. In MMT’s ideal world there would still be taxes, but their main purpose, aside from lessening inequality, would be as “offsets” to keep inflation under control. Taxes would drain just enough money from consumers and businesses so total spending in the economy won’t be excessive.

The Critics and Practicing MMT

With that formula, it’s no wonder that MMT has loud critics on Wall Street, where it’s sometimes derided as Magic Money Tree. What’s more surprising is how much flak the school of thought is taking from liberal economists who’d appear to be natural allies, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president. Summers has been making the case that wealthy nations are suffering from “secular stagnation” and require permanently high levels of stimulative deficit spending by governments to keep them out of recession, which is similar to what MMT argues. Yet in a recent Washington Post op-ed, Summers called MMT “fallacious at multiple levels.”

Summers and others may be worried that MMT will give a bad name to their more conventionally dovish views on deficits. “As long as they’re out there claiming that standard macroeconomics is all wrong, I guess we need to respond,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who is a professor at City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote on his New York Times blog.

MMT’s critics argue that trying to use fiscal policy to steer the economy is a proven failure because Congress and the president rarely act quickly enough to respond to a downturn. And they say politicians can’t be relied upon to impose pain on the public through higher taxes or lower spending to squelch rising inflation. MMTers respond that they also oppose fine-tuning and instead want to use automatic stabilizers—including the jobs guarantee—to keep the economy on track.

MMT’s detractors are skeptical of the idea that the treasury and central bank should work in concert. The Federal Reserve did the Treasury Department’s bidding during World War II, but that “overdraft” privilege was used spottily thereafter and permanently ended in 1981—precisely because economists warned that a subservient central bank would allow inflation to race out of control. They’re also dubious of the jobs guarantee, arguing that if the government’s wage for guaranteed jobs is too low it won’t do much to help unemployed workers or the economy, while if it’s too high it will undermine private employment. Tcherneva’s plan calls for $15 an hour. MMT envisions that government-employed workers would move back into the private sector when the economy strengthened, but that means some government functions would no longer be performed. In an email, Wray said the cyclical fluctuations in government employment are manageable.

Critics of MMT reject its reassurance that a country with its own currency doesn’t need to worry about deficits. After all, it’s been proven that a nation that loses the confidence of the world’s investors will see its currency plummet. As recently as 1976, the U.K. was forced to appeal to the International Monetary Fund to stabilize the value of sterling. Wray said the U.K.’s mistake was trying to peg its currency to the dollar and the crisis eased when it allowed the pound to float.

Other disagreements are harder for laypeople to parse. There are complicated arguments over how interest rates are determined and whether the government and private sectors compete for savings, for example. Mainstream economists argue that the correct parts of MMT aren’t new and the new parts aren’t correct. But MMTers point out that the establishment hasn’t covered itself in glory in recent years—largely failing to foresee the global financial crisis a decade ago, for instance. Paul McCulley, the former chief economist of bond giant Pacific Investment Management Co., says that though he’s “not a card-carrying MMTer,” he believes it offers a “robust architecture for a fiat currency world.”

In any case, the new textbook gives MMT a good slingshot. Samuelson, in the preface to the 1990 edition of his best-selling principles book, wrote, “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws—or crafts its advanced treaties—if I can write its economics textbooks.” Stephanie Kelton, an MMTer who was the economic adviser on Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016 and is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, sees the tide turning. In presentations, the Stony Brook University economist likes to flash up a quote that says, essentially: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. Then you win.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bring back the CCC

In 1933, FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which went on to employ 3m workers (5% of the US male workforce!) in projects whose benefit we still feel today: road- and trail-building, tree-planting, firefighting, infrastructure maintenance and more.

The CCC had serious flaws - notably a policy of racial and gender discrimination - but for those who were lucky enough to qualify, it was a transformative experience, an end to the years-long terror of economic precarity and a chance to make a difference in the world.

Millions of working-class Americans were given a chance to see their country and be immersed in the natural environment in a way that mainstreamed the principles of conservation. The beautiful outdoor spaces Americans enjoy today are the legacy of that program.

Today, about a quarter of the US workforce is unemployed; when you add in the people who are underemployed, or whose employment is in through a precarious, exploitative "gig economy" app that misclassifies them as contractors, the number climbs even higher.

But America does not lack for work that needs doing. The nation's crumbling infrastructure and public works need more than maintenance: the needs remediation and hardening against the coming waves of climate emergency.

Just in California, we need at least $1b worth of brush clearout and controlled burns, ANNUALLY, for the next DECADE, to make up for a century of forest mismanagement, terribly exacerbated by climate change.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/21/too-big-to-jail/#aflame

There's caring work, too, as people are traumatized by climate change and its heralds: invasive species, pandemic, dislocations.

Long term, there's relocating every coastal city inland. We have full employment for the next three centuries. At least.

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

The leading theorist of a modernized workforce to cope with climate emergency is Pavlina Tcherneva, whose "The Case for a Job Guarantee" makes the case that, beyond "programs" like CCC, we need to make employment for those who want it into a legal right.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2020-06-24/forget-ubi-says-an-economist-its-time-for-universal-basic-jobs

The Sanders campaign endorsed the idea, as do progressive elements of the Democratic Congressional caucus. But even though the party establishment hasn't come around to a guarantee, they have come out for a rebooted CCC, a Civilian Climate Corps.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-case-for-reviving-the-civilian-conservation-corps/

The new CCC is in the Biden platform, and versions of it have been mooted by Sen Dick Durbin [D-IL] and Rep Marcy Kaptur [D-OH]. As MattSimon points out in his Wired story, the CCC is an American institution, something with a national history.

The American exceptionalism used to dismiss other commonsense measures like universal health care ("Maybe it works in Sweden, but it won't work here") can't be applied to CCC: it has worked here, and left behind a beloved legacy.

The popularity of a new CCC is another sign that Reaganomics and its emphasis on enriching the wealthy in the hopes of some trickledown for the rest of us is on the way out.

If the US government gives people good jobs that pay inclusive wages and humane benefits, it will create massive demand for goods and services from the private sector.

"A revived CCC could pour money into tackling a bevy of other environmental problems, too. Revitalizing public green spaces, for instance, benefits all Americans. We urgently need to better prepare our coastlines for rising seas. Restoring wetlands and forests would pull double duty, returning ecosystems to their former glory and creating carbon sinks: Plant more trees and you can sequester more CO2 from the atmosphere. Actually, in the case of wetlands, make that triple duty—healthy wetlands work as flood control during hurricanes, absorbing surges of water."

[collapsedsquid]

MMT rejects the modern consensus that economies should be steered primarily by the raising and lowering of interest rates. MMTers believe that the natural rate of interest in a world of fiat money is zero and that pegging it higher is a giveaway to the investor class. They say tweaking interest rates is ineffectual because businesses make investment decisions based on prospects for growth, not the cost of money.

MMTers argue that economies should be guided by fiscal policy—government spending and taxation. They want a nation’s central bank to do the bidding of its treasury. So when the treasury needs money, the central bank accommodates it with a keystroke—creating base money from thin air by crediting the treasury’s checking account. The new textbook says that today, governments “tend to run unduly restrictive fiscal policy stances so as not to contradict the monetary policy stance.”

MMT says that, contrary to appearances, banks don’t make loans out of deposits. Rather, they make loans based on the demand for borrowing, then the borrowers stash the proceeds in the bank. Anyone they write a check to simply makes a deposit in another bank. The bottom line is that loans create deposits rather than deposits creating loans. This is one aspect of MMT that even some conservative central bankers—including those at Germany’s Bundesbank—agree with.

To stabilize employment, MMT would add a federally funded, locally administered job guarantee. Government would employ more people in slumps than in booms. Pavlina Tcherneva of Bard College’s Levy Economics Institute is refining the plan. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist from the Bronx who’s in her first term in Congress, supports the job guarantee and says MMT should be “a larger part of our conversation.”

MMT challenges a core principle of conventional economics, which is that an increase in budget deficits will tend to raise interest rates, all else equal. Just the opposite, it says, sounding a bit like the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland. When the government spends more, the private sector gets the money and puts it in the banking system. With more money in the system and no increase in demand for it, interest rates will tend to fall, not rise, MMT says. That is, unless the government chooses to soak up reserves by selling bonds, which it doesn’t have to do.

The reason the government doesn’t need to sell treasury securities, or levy taxes, to spend money is that the central bank, under the control of the treasury, can pay for everything by conjuring up electronic money. In MMT’s ideal world there would still be taxes, but their main purpose, aside from lessening inequality, would be as “offsets” to keep inflation under control. Taxes would drain just enough money from consumers and businesses so total spending in the economy won’t be excessive.

It’s tempting to view MMT’s conception of fiscal policy as essentially similar to that of the mainstream—“Hey, they believe in taxes, too!”—but that’s not quite right. MMTers hold that inflation isn’t primarily the result of excessively strong growth. They blame much of it on businesses’ excessive pricing power. So before trying to choke off growth to kill inflation, they would try to break up monopolies and stop banks from making too many loans. “The more actively we regulate big business for public purpose, the tighter the full employment we can achieve,” three MMTers wrote in a letter to the Financial Times’ Alphaville column that was published on March 1.

With that formula, it’s no wonder that MMT has loud critics on Wall Street, where it’s sometimes derided as Magic Money Tree. What’s more surprising is how much flak the school of thought is taking from liberal economists who’d appear to be natural allies, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary and former Harvard president. Summers has been making the case that wealthy nations are suffering from “secular stagnation” and require permanently high levels of stimulative deficit spending by governments to keep them out of recession, which is similar to what MMT argues. Yet in a recent Washington Post op-ed, Summers called MMT “fallacious at multiple levels.”

Summers and others may be worried that MMT will give a bad name to their more conventionally dovish views on deficits. “As long as they’re out there claiming that standard macroeconomics is all wrong, I guess we need to respond,” Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate who is a professor at City University of New York Graduate Center, wrote on his New York Times blog.

MMT’s critics argue that trying to use fiscal policy to steer the economy is a proven failure because Congress and the president rarely act quickly enough to respond to a downturn. And they say politicians can’t be relied upon to impose pain on the public through higher taxes or lower spending to squelch rising inflation. MMTers respond that they also oppose fine-tuning and instead want to use automatic stabilizers—including the jobs guarantee—to keep the economy on track.

Here is a piece on MMT for @argumate

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The first priority is to mobilize. That means building temporary field hospitals, drive-through clinics, and emergency health centers. It means cranking up production of essential equipment and medication, staffing health facilities adequately, and establishing support services for the hungry, homeless, and most vulnerable. And it means deploying an army to disinfect airports, schools, and critical public places. Second, we need to make it easier for people to stay home, such as by implementing short-term debt deferments (including on small business and mortgage loans) and suspending utility bills, as some European countries are already doing. Governments also should be providing income support in the form of extended unemployment insurance, food stamps, and housing benefits. In the US, all work requirements for public benefits should be abolished, and the federal government should extend immediate financial assistance to state governments constrained by balanced-budget laws.....Without direct, guaranteed employment, we are looking at decades of elevated unemployment. Alternatively, a person with a living-wage job can pay a mortgage, buy a plane ticket, and go to restaurants. An ample supply of good jobs for all who want them is the surest way to bring every sector of the economy back to full health.  But how will the government pay for it all? The same way it pays for everything else. It should not take a pandemic or a world war to remind citizens that the US government is self-financing. US public financial institutions – the Treasury and the US Federal Reserve – ensure that all government bills get paid, no questions asked. All that is needed, then, is for Congress to appropriate the budget and design an effective policy for managing this crisis and those that will come after it. No one is calling for wealthy taxpayers or foreign lenders to “pay for” the response. That is not how a government that controls its own currency finances itself. So, let us stop asking the trivial question of how to pay for it. Finding the money is never the problem. The focus should be on creating good jobs for the unemployed.

Pavlina R. Tcherneva, “What Would Roosevelt Do?”  (March 20th 2020).

[dailytechnologynews]

Forget UBI, says an economist: It's time for universal basic jobs - Economist Pavlina Tcherneva seizes this once-in-a-century moment to posit a spending program more ambitious, and likely more effective, than minimum wage hikes and universal basic income. https://ift.tt/2Npw6EH

[snapzubusiness]

Pavlina Tcherneva talks about "The Case for a Job Guarantee," and how public-sector work can pull us out of crises both immediate and long-term. via Snapzu : Business & Economy

[fadingsunsjvj]

Episode 14: The Job Guarantee & Social Justice (w/ Pavlina Tcherneva)

https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/episode-14-job-guarantee-social-justice-w-pavlina-tcherneva