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Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

The many benefits of a guaranteed job program (with Max Kasy and Lukas Lehner)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2023

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Oxford economists are currently running the world’s first Universal Job Guarantee program in Austria, and so far the results are very promising. When unemployed people have guaranteed access to training and/or a job, those people feel more in control of their lives and become more financially secure…and happier, too. The study’s co-authors join us to explain why they believe a guaranteed jobs program like this could work in other countries—including the United States. Maximilian Kasy is a Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford Lukas Lehner is an Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School (INET Oxford) and the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford Twitter: @maxkasy, @LukasLehner_ World’s first universal job guarantee boosts wellbeing and eliminates long-term unemployment https://www.inet.ox.ac.uk/news/worlds-first-universal-job-guarantee-boosts-wellbeing-and-eliminates-long-term-unemployment Does the future of work include a Federal Jobs Guarantee? https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/does-the-future-of-work-include-a-federal-jobs-guarantee-with-pavlina-tcherneva-and-representative-ro-khanna Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0

Some economists at Oxford University have found their way to designing a pilot program

0:08.2

for a universal job guarantee, actually the world's first.

0:12.6

This idea seemed kind of fanciful a few years ago and now not so much.

0:20.0

What the program does is to offer people a job but also to support them and make people

0:25.6

better off through the guarantee job.

0:32.6

From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics,

0:38.0

with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

0:48.8

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

0:52.3

I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.

1:01.1

So Goldie a long time ago, a couple of years ago I think at least, we started kicking

1:07.2

around the idea of federal jobs guarantee, basically a way of reforming or transforming

1:17.4

our social safety net in ways that was effectively more focused on giving people jobs than

1:27.6

just giving them money if they were unemployed.

1:31.4

And this was pre-COVID.

1:33.2

Yeah, that's right.

1:35.2

Back in the before times, we first discussed it on this podcast and it's interesting

1:43.4

because the COVID experience was one of massively ramping up unemployment insurance, both

1:51.4

increasing benefits and extending it during COVID to keep people from falling into destitution

1:57.4

as what 20% of the workforce found itself out of a job, whatever it was, the largest spike

2:06.7

in unemployment claims like off the scale like you'll never, it'll, it's like the doping

2:12.3

in baseball, you'll always have to have an asterisk for these years, but that's not what

2:17.1

they did throughout the world in some places.

...

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