Nathan,
Think beyond "low demand recession." Of course there is low demand and
a stimulus is important. I have children drawing unemployment, I know their
contemporaries doing the same (educated people) and I see, on my street, people
from late teens to, I estimate, 75, scavenging for bottles. Sandwichman has
already replied to you.
But as I read your post, without considering a reduction, a repeated reduction,
in standard working hours, you are endorsing the endless treadmill of growth.
Shopping to provide jobs? Is that really a Marxist vision of a future for
humans?
I too support increasing the demand for labor by directly hiring labor. The
WPA built things I am still enjoying, and the CCCs were an opportunity for
young guys, some of them going on to great futures. But that isn't all we need.
Gene
On Oct 6, 2011, at 11:19 PM, nathan tankus wrote:
> ahh now i know what you're saying sandwichman. i think this is an
> important point. however, i think the evidence we have shows that this
> is largely a low demand recession, rather then an obsolescence
> recession. why you ask? because unemployment is high across all
> sectors. if it was really excess capacity or inefficient (financial
> wise, not technical wise) productive processes, unemployment would be
> concentrated in a few sectors and capacity utilization rates would
> become much more highly variable between sectors. this isn't the case.
> that said, i don't think we should deal with the unemployment problem
> by having the government buy an arbitrary amount of output. as i said
> in my response to the "marxist final exam for keynesians", i support
> increasing the demand for labor directly by hiring labor directly.
> remember that there are leading and lagging sectors even during booms.
> the full employment of labor doesn't mean that obsolescent machinery
> can't be worked through, especially if aggregate demand policies aim
> to employ labor directly.
>
> --
> -Nathan Tankus
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