Like you and Mary Lou, I am not a big fan of UBI, which looks like a government plan for warehousing people they have given up on. A while ago, Professor Mario Seccareccia of the University of Ottawa told me about the job guarantee concept, where people who have been unemployed for a while are given a job to take them off the unemployment rolls. This has an advantage over UBI in that it is not necessarily universal. In fact, the largest such program ever attempted related to 16- to 19-year olds who had not yet graduated from high school. It would never apply to people of retirement age. They are supposed to retire. Judith Guerin describes this program in a 1984 report, “Lessons from a Job Guarantee. The Youth Incentive Entitlement Pilot Projects.” Most of the students in the program were black Americans. This wasn’t by design. It just happened. The program was judged a success both in terms of finding jobs for the young people and in getting them to finish high school. Sadly, there was no follow-up.
The idea however has not died. Lately the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) people have been championing it. I have no use for MMT in general but here they may be onto something. They seem to want all of these jobs to be government jobs but there is no need for that. Private businesses could be subsidized to give employment to unemployed people they would not otherwise have hired. I am not wedded to the job guarantee concept, but I am really surprised that it isn’t discussed more, particularly in regard to our young people, who have increasing difficulty finding jobs.
Great podcast as usual, Meghan.
Like you and Mary Lou, I am not a big fan of UBI, which looks like a government plan for warehousing people they have given up on. A while ago, Professor Mario Seccareccia of the University of Ottawa told me about the job guarantee concept, where people who have been unemployed for a while are given a job to take them off the unemployment rolls. This has an advantage over UBI in that it is not necessarily universal. In fact, the largest such program ever attempted related to 16- to 19-year olds who had not yet graduated from high school. It would never apply to people of retirement age. They are supposed to retire. Judith Guerin describes this program in a 1984 report, “Lessons from a Job Guarantee. The Youth Incentive Entitlement Pilot Projects.” Most of the students in the program were black Americans. This wasn’t by design. It just happened. The program was judged a success both in terms of finding jobs for the young people and in getting them to finish high school. Sadly, there was no follow-up.
The idea however has not died. Lately the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) people have been championing it. I have no use for MMT in general but here they may be onto something. They seem to want all of these jobs to be government jobs but there is no need for that. Private businesses could be subsidized to give employment to unemployed people they would not otherwise have hired. I am not wedded to the job guarantee concept, but I am really surprised that it isn’t discussed more, particularly in regard to our young people, who have increasing difficulty finding jobs.