The Job Guarantee and the Economic Bill of Rights

Professor Tcherneva’s talk will map the progressive policy proposals that are emerging in the upcoming election cycle, with a special emphasis on the Job Guarantee (JG). It charts a new path for public policy as it aims to achieve better economic stability and shared prosperity.  The JG is (in a manner of speaking) the unfinished business of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era, yet the modern proposal offers distinct benefits for the current economy. The relatively strong headline economic indicators mask the pain and distress that have built up across American communities for several decades. The talk will provide a diagnosis of these challenges and suggest that we are on the cusp of a new era of reshaping the public policy going forward.  It will conclude by evaluating how the Job Guarantee intersects with and advances the other progressive goals that will dominate the conversation over the next 2 years and beyond.

Pavlina R. Tcherneva, PhD, is Associate Professor and Chair at the Department of Economics at Bard College. She is also a Research Associate at the Levy Economics Institute and the Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. She specializes in the fields of monetary theory, fiscal policy, and macroeconomic stabilization. Her research examines the impact of direct job creation on growth, income inequality, and unemployment, and in particular on women and youth. She has developed a blueprint for implementing the Job Guarantee proposal for the United States, which has informed the proposals of several members of Congress. Tcherneva consulted for Bernie Sanders' 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, after her research on inequality had garnered national attention. She frequently speaks at Central Banks around the world and has worked with economists and policymakers from different countries on developing and evaluating direct job creation schemes. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters and her 2004 book Full Employment and Price Stability: The Macroeconomic Vision of William S. Vickrey reinterprets the proposals of the late Nobel Prize-winning economist for the modern day. During summer 2006, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge Centre for Economic and Public Policy, where she immersed herself in Keynes’s collected writings and personal papers. She developed an exposition of Keynes’s policy approach to full employment for which the Association for Social Economics recognized her with the Hellen Potter Prize (2012).