It's baaack: Paul's Japan paper (monetary policy and expectations in an era of low inflation) (trying not to be wonkish)

One of the ongoing debates in economic policy these days is the question of whether a central bank on its own can be effective at getting an economy out of the doldrums.

The most famous exposition of the idea that a central bank, by itself, has the ability to boost economic activity is Paul Krugman's paper entitled "It's baaack: Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap" (1998).

In the paper, Prof. Krugman explains that, in a (hypothetical) world of Ricardian equivalence in which fiscal policy has no effect on the real economy, the central bank can get households and firms to borrow and spend by announcing it will bring about higher inflation in the future.

Prof. Krugman knows that the assumption of Ricardian equivalence is far fetched and unrealistic; he only includes this simplifying and unrealistic assumption in his paper to make the point that the central bank can on its own stimulate the economy when fiscal policy is unavailable as a policy option (due to policymakers ideological aversion to public spending, the presence of high public debt, etc.).

Now before I go any further I want to say that I'm a huge fan of Paul Krugman. I think he's one of the most sensible economic commentators out there and I agree with almost all his views on policy. On the effectiveness of central banks alone to boost economic activity during a deep recession or depression, however, I'm quite skeptical.

The logic in Prof. Krugman's paper can be summarized as follows:

• households and firms will borrow and spend if they expect higher inflation in the future;
• borrowing and spending is influenced by the real interest rate (i.e., the nominal rate of interest less the expected rate of inflation); and 
• a rise in expected inflation is for all intents and purposes equivalent to (i.e., has the same effect as) a fall in the real interest rate.

In other words, Prof. Krugman is saying that an increase in expected inflation of, say, three percent will have the same expansionary effect as a three percent cut in interest rates.

All this makes for a plausible story. However, things aren't as simple in the real world.

The problem is that Prof. Krugman's 1998 paper makes inflation a function of expected future inflation, as in the New Keynesian Philips curve (which, in passing, since it assumes no trade-off between inflation and output gap stabilization, is "neither Keynesian or a Philips curve", as Robert Solow once quipped).

In the real world -- and the evidence and the current state of economic activity seem to support this -- inflation is a function of backward-looking expectations: inflation displays significant inertia. Peoples' beliefs about expected inflation are based on past and present inflation. The notion that past inflation is irrelevant, as embodied in the New Keynesian Philips curve, seems to me implausible.

Prof. Krugman is aware of this criticism. Economists Robert Gordon, Alan Blinder and Martin Neil Baily all raised this point during the discussion that took place following the presentation of his paper. Here are the minutes that were recorded from that discussion:

Robert Gordon...criticized the assumption in Krugman's models that the monetary authorities can easily change inflationary expectations for the future -- that the announcement of a policy will change expectations despite present slack in the economy. He believed that agents' expectations depend largely on actual experience, and that they will experience increased inflation only when there is pressure in the markets for goods, services, and labor. Alan Blinder agreed. He thought that Krugman's inflationary policy would work if it could be implemented; but that would require the Bank of Japan to create expected inflation, which, in turn, would require persuading people that the future was going to be fundamentally different from the past. Japan had zero inflation in the past six years, and the average in the previous decade was 1.8 percent per year. Thus to create expected inflation of 4 percent, with actual inflation lagging behind, would be difficult.[Martin] Baily concurred, observing that it would be easy for Russia to be credible in announcing inflationary policy but hard for Japan. (Krugman, 1998:201)

True believers in the power of central banks will respond to this line of criticism by reverting to this old saw: a credible central bank would not have let inflation get too low in the first place, thus people's expectations would never had been unhinged as a consequence. To this, I say: wishful thinking!

When it comes to the role of expectations in explaining macroeconomic outcomes, Robert Solow warned that it should be used with caution (though Solow said this in a different context):

...[T]o rest the whole argument on expectations -- that all-purpose unobservable -- just stops rational discussion in its tracks. I agree that the expectations, beliefs, theories, and prejudices of market participants are all important determinants of what happens. The trouble is that there is no outcome or behavior pattern that cannot be explained by one or another drama starring expectations. Since none of us can measure expectations (whose?) we have a lot of freedom to write the scenario we happen to like today. Should I respond...by writing a different play, starring somewhat different expectations? No thanks, I'd rather look at the data. (Solow and Taylor, 1998:93)

The problem with economics and economic policymaking these days is that too much of it relies on monetary policy and the role of the central bank. There are limits to what central banks can do because people do not believe central banks are omnipotent and have the ability to control inflation expectations on demand. For this reason, Old Keynesians had it right: fiscal policy must be resorted to bring about normal economic activity.

To summarize: Inflation displays inertia and peoples' expectations about the future cannot be dictated by the central bank alone. Basically, inflation is the result of the interplay of supply of demand for goods and services. When you have more demand than supply, prices and inflation accelerate; when you have more supply than demand, prices and inflation decelerate. It's that simple. That's the secret to understanding what creates inflation, barring the effect of any bottleneck issues.

The central bank can have an impact on future inflation, but mainly as a result of its influence in affecting aggregate demand and real economic activity in the present and future, not as a result of its ability to affect expected inflation and overall expectations in general.

The ongoing low inflation affecting economies at present despite considerable monetary stimulus and the use of unconventional monetary policies such as forward guidance in countries such as the U.S., the U.K, and Japan is evidence that expected inflation relies on past and actual inflation and that central banks' ability to stimulate economies at present via the so-called expectations channel or by attempting to increase expected inflation is currently severely limited.*

To follow me on Twitter, just look me up @circuit_FRB.

References

Solow, Robert, and John Tayor, Inflation, Unemployment and Monetary Policy, (MIT Press: Cambridge MA), 1998

Krugman, Paul. It's Baaack: "Japan's Slump and the Return of the Liquidity Trap", Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2:1998

* This post is dedicated to my heroes in macroeconomics: Robert Solow, Alan Blinder, Robert Gordon, Martin Neil Baily and Paul Krugman, to whom I owe so much for their insights

Secular stagnation, secular exhilaration and fiscal policy

Paul Krugman is right: secular stagnation has historically always referred to a situation of persistent low demand, which, according to my old 1971 Samuelson and Scott textbook, renders it inappropriate for governments to attempt to balance the budget over the business cycle (as per the principle of countercyclical compensation).

While in a secular stagnation (Is the shorthand 'SecStag' catching on?), Samuelson and Scott suggest that constant or near-constant government budget deficits are needed to sustain an adequate level of demand to achieve full employment, as shown here:

Samuelson and Scott (1971:437)

The policy stance required during secular stagnation contrasts with the stance needed during periods of so-called "secular exhilaration" (with high demand), during which the right policy is running budget surpluses as a way to avoid overheating the economy and reduce inflationary pressures.

It's true that sustained deficits will increase public debt; however, the low cost of borrowing that usually comes with secular stagnation should help to ensure public debt levels won't get out of hand.

But hasn't the experience of Japan in the 1990s taught us that big deficits don't work to stimulate a stagnant economy, you might ask?

The answer is no. Kenneth Kuttner and Adam Posen demonstrated in "Passive Savers and Policy Effectiveness in Japan" that low tax revenues caused by a weak economy were to blame for the rising debt levels, not expansionary fiscal policy.

Of course, it's important that the spending be directed toward productive use.

I can think of two ways to achieve this goal. First, governments should invest in early childhood learning, an investment that's well known to pay-off in the long-run. Second, investing in infrastructure is also a good bet, as demonstrated several years ago by David Aschauer and Alicia Munnell, and as recently recommended by the IMF.

References

Aschauer, D., 1989, "Is Public Expenditure Productive", Journal of Monetary Economics, Vol. 23, pp. 177-200.

IMF, "Is it time for an infrastructure push? The macroeconomic effects of public investments", Chapter 3, October 2014.

Kuttner, K. and A. Posen, "Passive Savers and Policy Effectiveness in Japan", Institute for International Economics, 2001.

Munnell, A., 1990, "Why has productivity declined? Productivity and Public Investment" New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, January/February issue, pp. 3-22.

Samuelson and Scott, Economics, 3rd Canadian Edition, McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Deficit, Deficit, Who's got the Deficit? (Secular stagnation edition)

Over 50 years ago, James Tobin wrote an article for the New Republic entitled "Deficit, Deficit, Who's got the Deficit" (1963) that explains why the US federal government almost always needs to run a budget deficit.

The article is a gem. It has everything a good macroeconomics article should have: lots of debunking, all the relevant data, and a good dose of policy recommendations.

Unfortunately, the article is nowhere to be found on the internet. This post seeks to fix that by providing some key excerpts. Another purpose of this post is to use Tobin's analytical framework in that article and apply it to today's economic environment in the US.

Tobin on US Sectoral Financial Balances, circa 1963

The article starts off by describing the fundamental (iron?) law of financial balances:

For every buyer there must be a seller, and for every lender a borrower. One man's expenditure is another's receipt. My debts are your assets, my deficits your surplus. 

If each of us was consistently "neither borrower nor lender," as Polonius advised, no one would ever need to violate the revered wisdom of Mr. Micawber. But if the prudent among us insist on running and lending surpluses, some of the rest of us are willy-nilly going to borrow to finance budget deficits. 

In the United States today one budget that is usually left holding a deficit is that of the federal government. When no one else borrows the surpluses of the thrifty, the Treasury ends up doing so. Since the role of debtor and borrower is thought to be particularly unbecoming to the federal government , the nation feels frustated and guilty. 

Unhappily, crucial decisions of economic policy too often reflect blind reactions to these feelings. The truisms that borrowing is the counterpart of lending and deficits the counterpart of surpluses are overlooked in popular and Congressional discussions of government budgets and taxes. Both guilt feelings and policy are based serious misunderstanding of the origin of federal budget and surpluses. (1963:10)

Tobin then goes on to explain that both the household and financial sectors were running large financial surpluses (worth $20 billion combined in 1963):

American households and financial institutions consistently run financial surpluses. They have money to lend, beyond their own needs to borrow. As a group American households and non-profit institutions have in recent years shown a net financial surplus averaging about $15 billion a year -- that is, households are ready to lend, or to put into equity investments...more than they are ready to borrow. [...] In addition, financial institutions regularly generate a lendable surplus, now of the order of $5 billion a year. For the most part these institutions -- banks, saving and loans associations, insurance companies, pension funds, and like -- are simply intermediaries which borrow and relend the public's money. Their surpluses result from the fact that they earn more their lending operations than they distribute or credit to their depositors, shareowners, and policyholders. [...]

The article goes on to list the sectors of the economy that must borrow the $20 billion in surplus funds available from households and financial institutions:

State and local governments as a group have been averaging $3-4 billion a year of net borrowing...Unincorporated businesses, including farms, absorb another 3-4 billion a year. To the rest of the world we can lend perhaps $2 billion a year. We cannot lend abroad -- net -- more than the surplus of our exports over our imports of goods and services, and some of that surplus we give away in foreign aid. [...]

The remainder -- some $10-12 billion -- must be used either by nonfinancial corporate business or by the federal government. Only if corporations as a group take $10-12 billion of external funds, by borrowing or issuing new equities, can the federal government expect to break even. [...]

Tobin then follows into a discussion about the policy implications of these lending and borrowing dynamics:

The moral is inescapable, if startling. If you would like the federal deficit to be smaller, the deficits of business must be bigger. Would you like the federal government to run a surplus and reduce its debt? Then the business deficits must be big enough to absorb that surplus as well as the funds available from households and financial institutions. 

That does not mean business must run at a loss -- quite the contrary. Sometimes, it is true, unprofitable business are forced to borrow or to spend financial reserves just to stay afloat; this was a major reason for business deficits in the depths of the Great Depression. But normally it is business with good profits and good prospects that borrow and sell new shares of stock, in order to finance expansion and modernization...The incurring of financial deficits by business firms -- or by households and governments for that matter -- does not usually mean that such institutions are living beyond their means and consuming their capital. Financial deficits are typically the means of accumulating nonfinancial assets -- real property in the form of inventories, buildings and equipment. 

When does business run big deficits? When do corporations draw heavily on the capital markets? The record is clear: when business is very good, when sales are pressing hard on capacity, when businessmen see further expansion ahead. Though corporations' internal funds -- depreciation allowances and plowed-back profits -- are large during boom times, their investment programs are even larger. [...]

Recession, idle capacity, unemployment, economic slack -- these are the enemies of the balanced government budget. When the economy is faltering, households have more surpluses available to lend, and business firms are less inclined to borrow them. (1963:11)

The Corporate Sector: From Deficits to Large Surpluses

Of course, at the time Tobin wrote this article, US financial balances weren't exactly the same as they are today. Households as a group were running financial surpluses, the US was mostly a net lendor to the rest of the world, and the corporate sector was a net borrower of funds. Essentially, three things have changed since the mid-1980s with respect to financial balances (see charts below, double-click to enlarge).

First, starting in the mid-1980s, the US has become a net borrower to the rest of the world. Second, since the early 1990s and until the financial crisis, households were net borrowers to other sectors; since 2007, the household sector has returned to its traditional role of being a net lender. Finally, since the 1990s, the corporate sector has been at different times either a net lender or net borrower. However, since 2009, the corporate sector has been running a very large net financial surplus.*

What is the main policy implication to take-away from this state of affairs?

I would venture that the main take-away is that it's unlikely the US federal government will balance its budget any time soon unless households and/or firms start spending again.

In a recent article for an IMF publication entitled "Secular Stagnation: Affluent Economies Stuck in Neutral", economist Robert Solow (MIT) discussed the business sector's net lending position as a possible sign that there may be a "shortage of investment opportunities yielding a rate of return acceptable to investors" or, stated differently, that the "real rate of interest compatible with full utilization is negative, and not consistently achievable", a situation associated with the notion of "secular stagnation":

In the United States, at least, business investment has recovered only partially from the recession, although corporate profits have been very strong. The result, as pointed out in an unpublished paper by Brookings Institution Senior Fellows Martin Baily and Barry Bosworth, is that business saving has exceeded business investment since 2009. The corporate sector, normally a net borrower, became a net lender to the rest of the economy. This does smell rather like a reaction to an expected fall in the rate of return on investment, as the stagnation hypothesis suggests. (see chart below)

Source: Baily and Bosworth, 2013

Secular Stagnation

So what can be done? Paul Samuelson and Anthony Scott asked a similar question in the 1971 Canadian edition of their Economics textbook:

What if our continental economy is in for what Harvard's Alvin Hansen called "secular stagnation"? - which means a long period in which slowing population increase, [...], high corporate saving, the vast piling up of capital goods, and a bias toward capital-saving inventions will imply depressed investment schedules relative to saving schedules? Will not active fiscal policy designed to wipe out such deflationary gaps then result in running a deficit most of the time, leading to a secular growth in the public debt? The modern answer is "Under these conditions, yes; and over the decades the budget should not necessarily be balanced." (1971:436-7)

In my next post, I'll write more about secular stagnation and policy responses to address its possible eventuality.

* This post by Brian Romanchuk contains many useful charts and information on financial balances, as well as discusses secular stagnation from a stock-flow consistent perspective.

Update: I added charts on 2014-10-14, following a comment by Ramanan.

References

Baily, M. N., B. Bosworth, "The United States Economy: Why such a weak recovery", September 11, 2013, Brookings Institution, Washington DC.

Samuelson and Scott, Economics, 3rd Canadian Edition, McGraw-Hill, 1971

Solow, R., "Secular Stagnation: Affluent Economies Stuck in Neutral", in Looming Ahead, Finance and Development, vol. 51 , no.3. September 2014.

Tobin, J., "Deficit, Deficit, Who's got the Deficit?", New Republic, January 19, 1963

Paul Krugman on currency independence, circa 1999

If there's one macroeconomic observation that has gone from obscure to remarkably mainstream in recent years, it's that a nation that has given up its currency independence is at a big disadvantage relative to nations with independent, sovereign currencies, especially when it comes to options for addressing economic downturns and overcoming the aftermath of financial crises.

Paul Krugman has been a main proponent of this view. And he's been at it for a while.

Here's an excerpt from a classic piece by Krugman from 1999 on the ills faced by Argentina after it experimented with dollarization in the 90s:

The problem, you see, is that the same rules that prevent Argentina from printing money for bad reasons--to pay for populist schemes or foolish wars--also prevent it from printing money for good reasons such as fighting recessions or rescuing the financial system. [...] 

Now, these problems with a rigidly fixed exchange rate are not news. But for a while, currency-board enthusiasts managed to convince themselves that they weren't significant. They argued that as long as governments themselves followed stable policies--and as long as the economy was sufficiently 'flexible' (the all-purpose answer to economic difficulties)--there would be few serious recessions. 

But it turns out that history does not stop just because the currency is stable. And faced with a politically inconvenient recession, the Peronists find that there is nothing they can do. They cannot print money. They cannot even borrow money for some employment-generating public spending, because fiscal indiscipline would undermine the peso's hard-won credibility.

Read the entire column here.

Reference 

Krugman, P., Don't laugh at me Argentina, Slate, July 20, 1999

It's the demand, stupid! The role of weak demand on productivity growth

I couldn't resist the title.

Last week I was invited to give a short talk on what I thought was the most pressing policy issue facing the world economy today.

So I presented the findings from a very interesting paper entitled "Explaining Slower Productivity Growth: The Role of Weak Demand Growth" by Someshwar Rao and Jiang Li.

The paper examines the link between demand and productivity growth in both Canada and OECD countries. This issue has been an interest of mine ever since I read these lines in a book by Alan Blinder several years ago:

Economic slack...discourages business investment because companies that cannot sell their wares see little reason to expand their capacity. In consequence, the nation gradually acquires a smaller, older, and less efficient capital stock. 

[A]lthough the state of the national is far from the only factor, who doubts that a booming economy provides a better atmosphere for inventiveness, innovation, and entrepreneurs than a stagnant one? As the cliché says, a rising tide raises all boats...From 1962 to 1973, our generally healthy economy experienced only one mild recession, an average unemployment rate of 4.7 percent, and productivity growth that averaged a brisk 2.6 percent per annum. [Between 1974 and the mid-1980s] the economy [was] frequently...out of sorts. We...suffered through two long recessions and one short one, with an average unemployment rate of 7.3 percent and a paltry average productivity growth rate of 1 percent. This association of high unemployment with low productivity growth is no coincidence. 

Surveying these concomitants of high unemployment -- lack of upward mobility for workers, sluggish investment, lackluster productivity growth -- suggests an ironic conclusion: the best way to practice supply-side economics may be to run the economy at peak levels of demand. (1986:36).

This still makes lots of sense to me.

Verdoorn's Law

During my talk I described the paper as lending support to the well-known findings of economist Petrus J. Verdoorn, who several decades ago published research showing a positive relationship between labour productivity growth and real output growth.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have discussed this since it led to a number of questions on Verdoorn and his research, which shifted the focus away from the paper and the real purpose of my talk, which was to drive home the point that there is considerable evidence that productivity growth shouldn't be viewed as solely a supply-side phenomenon.

Specifically, the paper supports the -- in my opinion, common sense -- view that a slowdown in domestic and external demand is detrimental to growth in labour productivity, real incomes and economic activity because of the negative impact of weaker demand on scale and scope of economies, formation of physical and human capital, innovation and entrepreneurial activity.

Here are the paper's main findings:

Our major findings is that 93 percent of the fall in average labour productivity growth between 1981-2000 and 2000-2012 can be attributed to the drop in real GDP growth between the two periods...In addition, our new empirical research shows that a slowdown in growth of domestic and external demand also impacts negatively some of the key drivers of productivity growth, such as, gross fixed capital formation, M&E investment (including ICTs) and R&D spending, thus leading to lower trend labour productivity. (2013:14)

I concluded my presentation by discussing some of the policy implications outlined by the paper's authors. At this point, I was hoping my comments would get the attention of the government policy analysts and economists in the audience.

First, I suggested that it would be prudent for governments to ensure that deficit and debt reduction measures are gradual in nature so that their negative impact on domestic demand would not be excessive.

Then, I explained that it's always a good idea for governments to spend on productivity-enhancing public investment, even during a period of economic slowdown, as it contributes to both today's demand as well as future productivity growth.

References

Blinder, A., Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, (Mass: Perseus Books)

Rao, Someshwar and Jiang Li, "Explaining Slower Productivity Growth: The Role of Weak Demand Growth", International Productivity Monitor, Spring 2013.

Anthony Atkinson on the public debt and intergenerational equity

It's been a long time since my last post. Much of my spare time has been spent reading and thinking about the best way to think about the economy. In the end, I've come to the conclusion that it's the big picture that matters.

Take the question of the public debt. Much of the discussion in the popular press relating to the national debt focuses on the liabilities of the government and actuarial concerns (dealing with "how to pay it off"), but it rarely discusses the link between public debt and private wealth, wealth distribution and intergenerational equity.

Anthony Atkinson, I believe, summarized it best here:

Much of the rhetoric of fiscal consolidation is concerned with the national debt as a burden on future generations [...] One lesson of the public economics literature on the national debt is that we have to look at the full picture. We pass on to the next generations:

• national debt, 
• state pension liabilities, 
• public financial assets, 
• public infrastructure and real wealth, 
• private wealth, 
• state of the environment, and
• stocks of natural resources.

We need to look at the overall balance sheet, where assets as well as liabilities are taken into account. This does not mean that the position is a healthy one. If we consider the difference between the assets of the state and the national debt, expressed as a percentage of the total national wealth, then in the 1950s the net worth of the [UK] state was negative, but it was becoming less negative, and turned positive in the 1960s [...]

The direction of change since the 1970s has however been in the wrong direction [...] In effect the process of privatisation, with the proceeds used largely to fund tax cuts, transferred wealth from the state to the personal sector. We saw that it was at the end of the 1970s that personal wealth began to rise faster than income. The worsening of the public balance sheet is the other side. Personal wealth has risen faster than national wealth since the 1970s because, in effect, assets have been transferred from the public to the private sector. We are passing on more privately to the next generation but less publicly.

Reversing this pattern can be achieved not only by reducing the national debt, but also by increasing public assets.

Now, to say that more wealth is being passed on privately rather than publicly does not mean that it's being passed on equitably.

For instance, when the government sells-off public sector assets such as parks and decommissioned military bases, the government can use the proceeds to pay down the debt, but the assets get transferred to the purchasers of those assets in the private sector, who, most of the time, don't have the same class and socio-economic profile as that of the whole population (i.e., the former "owners" of those assets).

So here's the bottom line: paying down the debt by selling off public assets to the financial interests has contributed immensely to the wealth inequality that is being discussed these days.

And the corollary to this statement is that there's still lots of wealth "out there" that could be used for public purposes and has the potential to be passed on to future generation in a more equitable manner. It hasn't disappeared, it's just changed hands.

Reference

Atkinson, A.B., "Public economics in an age of austerity", January 12, 2012

When the Fed supported a Job Guarantee policy (and the economist who made it happen)

Circuit here. I'm back from a few months hiatus following the birth of my second child, a baby girl. Thanks to all readers for your continued interest in this blog.

A few weeks ago, Rolling Stone magazine ran a piece by Jesse Myerson supporting the idea that the government should guarantee a job to anyone who is willing to work. In their recent work, Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein also give support to this policy proposal. Randy Wray, Warren Mosler and other modern money (MMT) economists have been pushing for this idea for a long time. On the center-right and right, the idea is being promoted by Peter Cove and Kevin Hasset.

This is good news. I certainly welcome a good debate on this idea. That said, it's too bad that commentators who are skeptical of the idea simply dismiss it as a non-starter for policymakers.

This, of course, is overstating the case somewhat. It's worth recalling that in the 1970s none other than the Chairman of the Federal Reserve supported the idea that the federal government should be the "employer of last resort". Here's the former Fed Chairman Arthur Burns back in 1975:

I believe that the ultimate objective of labor market policies should be to eliminate all involuntary unemployment. This is not a radical or impractical goal. It rests on the simple but often neglected fact that work is far better than the dole, both for the jobless individual and for the nation. A wise government will always strive to create an environment that is conducive to high employment in the private sector. Nevertheless, there may be no way to reach the goal of full employment short of making the government an employer of last resort. This could be done by offering public employment -- for example, in hospitals, schools, public parks, or the like -- to anyone who is willing to work at a rate of pay somewhat below the Federal minimum wage. 

Burns

With proper administration, these public service workers would be engaged in productive labor, not leaf-raking or other make-work. To be sure, such a program would not reach those who are voluntarily unemployed, but there is also no compelling reason why it should do so. What it would do is to make jobs available for those who need to earn some money. 

It is highly important, of course, that such a program should not become a vehicle for expanding public jobs at the expense of private industry. Those employed at the special public jobs will need to be encouraged to seek more remunerative and more attractive work. This could be accomplished by building into the program certain safeguards -- perhaps through a Constitutional amendment -- that would limit upward adjustment in the rate of pay for these special public jobs. With such safeguards, the budgetary cost of eliminating unemployment need not be burdensome. I say this, first, because the number of individuals accepting the public service jobs would be much smaller than the number now counted as unemployed; second, because the availability of public jobs would permit sharp reduction in the scope of unemployment insurance and other governmental programs to alleviate income loss. To permit active searching for a regular job, however, unemployment insurance for a brief period -- perhaps 13 weeks or so -- would still serve a useful function.

The idea was even supported by one of the most respected names in economics at the time: Franco Modigliani.  When asked to comment on Chairman Burns's proposal during a testimony before the Congressional Banking committee in 1976, Modigliani said the following:

...the idea of a public employment program as an employer of last resort, which is an alternative to unemployment compensation, strikes me as a very sound idea (p. 110).

Interestingly, the economist who got Burns and the Fed to put serious thought into the idea of a job guarantee was another well-respected contributor to US public policy during that period: Eli Ginzberg.

Job Creation through Public Service Employment

Eli Ginzberg was a Professor of Economics at Columbia University and author of numerous books on human resources and manpower economics. He was also -- in the language of Harold Wilensky and organizational sociology -- a "contact man", a person who provides ideas and furnishes intelligence to decision-makers on the political and ideological tendencies in the society at large. Ginzberg played this role throughout his career as presidential adviser for many administrations and through his affiliation with the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), which recently marked its 40th year of operation.

Ginzberg was an institutional economist in the tradition of John M. Clark and Wesley C. Mitchell who believed fervently that "people, rather than physical or financial capital, were the principal source of productivity and wealth" (1987:107). For this reason, Ginzberg believed it was critical for the government to eliminate unemployment as quickly as possible through the use of a publicly-funded jobs program.

Another reason why Ginzberg believed the government ought to be employer of last resort is that he understood that economies sometimes face a shortfall in jobs that makes it impossible for all unemployed workers to find work:

Just as reality has mocked the ethos of equality of opportunity for many minority children, the counterpart doctrine that adults are responsible for their own support and that of their dependents has been undermined by the continuing shortfall in jobs. The existence of high unemployment rates make it socially callous, even reprehensible, for a society to continue to affirm the doctrine that all adults who need income should work and then not provide adequate opportunities for many of them to fulfill this imperative. 

Although the US experimented with federally financed job creation in the 1930s and again in the 1970s, the record in retrospect must be viewed as equivocal. Most students believe that on balance the New Deal was right to put large numbers of the unemployed to work on governmentally financed programs rather than to keep them on the dole as the British did. (1987:162) 

Ginzberg

On this last point concerning whether income transfers or guaranteed work should be the centerpiece of US social policy, Ginzberg's view was informed by the work he did during the Great Depression. Here's how Ginzberg summarized the conclusions of a 1947 book entitled The Unemployed that he co-authored on the topic of unemployment during the Great Depression:

The principal lessons I extracted included the superiority of work relief over cash support...; the cause of unemployment being rooted in a shortfall in demand for labor, not in the inadequacies of the unemployed; the centrality of work and self-support for the integrity of the individual worker, his family, and the community. By the time our investigation was concluded, [we] were convinced that no society concerned about its security and survival could afford to remain passive and inert in the face of long-term unemployment. We argued that in the absence of an adequate number of private sector jobs, it was the responsibility of government to create public sector jobs. (1987:111)

Ginzberg also believed that guaranteed work for those who are able and willing would find greater acceptability among Americans than a policy that would require government providing a guarantee income to everyone. According to Ginzberg, providing guaranteed income to everyone would conflict with the powerful American ethos of self-reliance and the American population's highly favorable view toward the culture of work:

There is no simple way, in fact, there is no way to square the following: to provide a decent minimum income for every needy person/family in the US, given the differentials in living standards, public attitudes, and state taxing capacity, and at the same time avoid serious distortions in basic value and incentive systems that expect people to be self-supporting through income earned from paid employment. (157)

For this reason, Ginzberg believed that a job guarantee should play a key role in social policy:

Accordingly, I would like to shift the focus from welfare to work, from income transfers to the opportunity to compete, from dependency status to participation in society. In advocating this shift toward jobs and earned income and away from unemployment and income transfers, the planners must focus on two fundamentals: the developmental experiences that young people need in order to be prepared to enter and succeed in the world of work; and the level of employment opportunities that a society must provide so that everybody able and willing to work, at least at the minimum wage, will be able to do so. (157)

In the 1970s, Ginzberg held the position of Chairman of the National Commission for Manpower Policy, a government-mandated commission that produced some of the best policy-oriented research on the topic of public service employment, including an excellent paper entitled "Public Service Employment as Macroeconomic Policy" by Martin Neil Baily and Robert Solow (1978) that explains how public service employment (PSE), while not necessarily more stimulative than the normal kind of fiscal policy (e.g., government spending on goods and services and tax measures), can be a perfectly sensible policy if the program is well-administered and the jobs that are created provide useful social output:

Solow and Baily

We conclude that the main advantages of PSE over conventional fiscal policy are: (a) that it can be targeted to provide jobs for hard-to-employ groups in the labour force, and for especially depressed cities and regions; (b) that PSE employment, correctly targeted, may be slightly less inflationary than the same amount of ordinary private sector employment, so that total employment can safely be a little higher with a PSE component; and (c) that PSE can be coordinated with other forms of social insurance -- public assistance and unemployment insurance, for instance -- to make them perhaps more effective and certainly more acceptable to public opinion. (1978:30)

Solow later revisited the issue of public service employment in Work and Welfare (1998), in which he argued that any attempt to reform the welfare system in order to get the unemployed back to work would only succeed if every able and willing worker is given access to a job through public service employment and/or by offering incentives to businesses to hire the unemployed.

The Deal 

It was in the 1970s that Ginzberg persuaded Chairman Burns to call on the US federal government to become the employer of last resort.  Here's Ginzberg's account of how he was able to get the Fed Chairman to support the job guarantee:

I made a deal with Arthur Burns when he was the head of the Federal Reserve, that I would try to control the amount of money we asked for from the Congress for manpower training if he would come out in favor of the government as the employer of last resort. And he did it. It took him a year, but I negotiated with him and he did it.

A final word. Although Ginzberg supported the idea of a job guarantee, he fully recognized the high budgetary cost that such a policy would entail and the practical challenges facing public administrators in terms of successfully implementing a public service employment program. To address these concerns, he believed the government authorities should make improvements to the program using trial and error and cautious experimentation. But the key, he would argue, is to ensure that the jobs created through these measures provide productive social output:

There is no big trick to put more and more people on public service employment. If that is the only thing that one is interested in, obviously, the Federal Government can create the money by fiat and put more people on public service employment. The question is what are the short- and long-run implications of doing that in terms of keeping our economy productive, competitive and innovative....So I do not think it is just jobs; it is productive jobs and that is another way of saying that the Federal Government can go only part of the way in terms of assuring that we have a productive economy. 

References

Baily, Martin N. and Robert Solow, "Public Service Employment as Macroeconomic Policy", National Commission for Manpower Policy, 1978

Ginzberg, Eli, The Skeptical Economist, Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1987

National Commission for Manpower Policy, "Job Creation through Public Service Employment: An Interim Report to the Congress", 1978

Solow, Robert, Work and Welfare, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998