The Job Guarantee and Modern Money Theory: Realizing Keynes’s Labor Standard (Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity)

The contributors to this edited collection argue that a flexible Job Guarantee program able to react to an economy’s fluctuating need for work would stabilize the labor standard, the value of employment in relation to money. During economic downturns, the program would expand to provide more public sector jobs in response to private sector layoffs. It would then contract when economic growth offered private sector employment opportunities. This flexible full employment program would create a balanced, perpetually active labor force, providing the macroeconomic stability necessary to define a functioning labor standard.

Mathew Forstater is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA; Research Director at the Binzagr Institute for Sustainable Prosperity; and Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, USA. He is engaged in projects on employment and federal budget policy, using a historical, interdisciplinary approach to examine the potential role of full employment policies in the face of deficit reduction and continuous technological change.