Re: unemployment

[larson@xxxxxx]

Quoting Whitalone@xxxxxxx:

> Could you elaborate on the drawbacks of existing programs and how they
>
> contrast to the proposed schemes offered on this forum?  Or at the very
> least
> provide me with resources that document these drawbacks.

Start with www.ifau.se and follow information in English. There is a lot more,
but that's an institute devoted to evaluating existing programs. However, you
need a lot more to get the whole picture. I'll get back to that. Generally,
there has been one great drawback: the replacement of financial transfers from
the government with work-or-starve offers to the unemployed has given cities
and counties (responsible for health care) a huge oppotunity to fire permanent
staff and replace them with work-or-starve people who are not on their own
payroll. If this is an acceptable side effect of any JG/ELR program then don't
count me in among your supporters. That will only give austerity advocates yet
another weapon against sound fiscal policy. If you can avoid it I'm still
interested.

> Perhaps Sven can give
> more insight into the actual operation of this type of program from his
> European experience.

There are two different patterns in Scandinavia. In Denmark meaningful
education offers do not force people into work-or-starve choices. And
unemployment is effectively less than half that of Sweden, where anything that
keeps someone busy is given as a work-or-starve offer. There are countless
examples of what this has led to. 19-year-olds with poor training from high
school and with apparently anti-social tendencies are sent in to help take care
of patients in hospitals. People with no college training at all are hired as
school teachers. 60+ women with worn out bodies after decades of hard physical
work and with no professional experience of children are "encouraged" to become
full-time kindergarten teachers. People are shuffled around between generic
jobs just to fill a position, putting no interest whatsoever into their daily
jobs and just waiting to get out of it and on to something else. As an
extension of the work-or-starve policy, people who are not "offered" to work-or-
starve right away are forced to send applications in for up to 20 jobs per week
or else they get no money. (The immediate effect when this program was first
implemented was a notable drop in job ads in newspapers as HR staff were
flooded with applications from people with no other purpose than to fill their
quota.)

> However, Sven, I would appreciate a more rigorous debate of ideas rather
> than
> the emotional tent I read from the above quote.
> i understand your skeptical criticism and welcome the discourse.

Emotional tent? I was asking for further details and elaboration. When someone
suggests that work-or-starve is not effectively slavery, I think one has the
right to ask that person to fill in a certain number of blanks.

> However,
> the fact remains that welfare as we know it, or even the elr types of
> programs as they are presently presented, offer little to future policy
> prescription at the national level in solving unemployment in today's
> economic environment.

How about raising effective demand? It could actually work. I have no problem
with combining fierce demand stimulus with a PROPERLY designed job
guarantee/ELR program, but until the idea of work-or-starve is taken out of it
that program can never be properly designed. Also: by focusing exclusively on
the labor market we simply run the errands of austerity advocates and supply
side conservatives whose first and foremost interest is to blame the victim on
the labor market.

I find Scott Simpson's interest in the Scandinavian experiences productive and
progressive. What I still find disturbing is that no ELR/JG proponent has yet
shown how their programs relate to the extensive existing labor market
literature with concentration on workfare/job guarantee programs.

Keynes,
/srl

--
Sven R Larson
PhD; Assistant professor of economics
Department of Social Sciences, Bldg. 22.2
Roskilde University
Pb 260
DK-4000 Roskilde
Telephone: (+45) 4674 2910