What Jobs Should a Public Job Guarantee Provide?: Lessons from Hyman P. Minsky

Daniel Haim

Economics Working Paper Archive from Levy Economics Institute

Abstract: The job guarantee is a viable policy option for tackling both unemployment and underemployment. Hyman P. Minsky was one of the seminal writers on this subject. The first part of this working paper provides a survey of Minsky's writings to identify what kind of jobs he had in mind when recommending employer-of-last-resort policies. Minsky favored: (1) jobs increasing socially useful output, providing all of society better public services and goods; (2) jobs guaranteed by the public sector on a project-by-project basis at a minimum wage; (3) jobs in the places where people need them; and (4) jobs taking the people that need them as they are. The second part of the paper suggests policy recommendations for today's economy. As long as the COVID-19 pandemic still rages on, a targeted public job guarantee program can assist in the social provisioning and distribution of food, shelter, and medical services. After the pandemic, a public job guarantee can reduce poverty and inequality, and bring about a more democratic, sustainable, and socially cohesive economic system.

Keywords: Job Guarantee; Public Service Employment; Employer of Last Resort (ELR); Unemployment; Full Employment; Minsky; Policy Design; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B31 E24 E61 H41 H53 I38 J21 J45 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-lma, nep-mac and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_981.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_981.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://levyweb.bard.edu/pubs/wp_981.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:lev:wrkpap:wp_981

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Paper Archive from Levy Economics Institute
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Elizabeth Dunn ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).