**Economic Sectors**
Jobs
Kervick, PhD in Philosophy from Univ. of Mass, 12
[Dan, “Doing what needs to be done: Facing the Future with Full Employment and a Renewed Public Sector,” New Economic Perspectives, Feb. 2, 2012,http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/02/02, accessed 7-2-12]bg
As you read this, millions of Americans who desperately want to work either cannot find employment at all, or cannot find the quantity and quality of work they need to meet their own needs and the needs of their families. This is real suffering. The unemployed are real flesh-and-blood people, not just fractions of percentage points on Labor Department spreadsheets. At the same time, we have tremendous unmet social needs. Any well-informed high school student can point to large, daunting national challenges that we sorely need to address, but that we are not addressing with anything approaching the urgency and commitment that the gravity of the challenges would seem to demand of us. So the availability of unemployed human labor power is extremely high, while the need for applied, energetic human effort is extremely acute. Mainstream textbook economics tells us that these kinds of problems are supposed to solve themselves without the need for active government intervention. The availability of some resource, on the one side, and the need to acquire those resources, on the other, are supposed to meet and court each other in the market. The former comes dressed as supply, and the latter as demand. Supply and demand curves intersect and copulate, give birth to a price and – voila! – the market clears as the satisfied suppliers and demanders perform their happy jig of mutual gratification. Clearly, things are not working out that way, or at least not with the alacrity that the textbook accounts would suggest and that moral decency would require. Here in the US, while those sterile supply and demand curves languish in the logical space of microeconomic theory, the sorry employment scene has settled down into a new normal of persistently high joblessness with no end in sight. Yet much of the national discussion of the problem of unemployment in the United States is bogged down in pedantic side-discussions, commingled with cantankerous ideological stubbornness. The political class addresses the employment crisis with lame half-measures or impotent shrugs on one side of the debate, and with malevolent snickering and scapegoating of the jobless on the other side. Where the politicians rise above their pattern of neglect to put forward actual policies, the solutions offered consist in part of schemes to bribe corporations and their lobbyists into hiring by greasing corporate palms with crony tax giveaways. What seems to be missing in the debate is public consideration of the most obvious solution: A nation faced with both pressing unmet needs for work and a large pool of available unemployed workers, and that also possesses sovereign control over its own currency system, can take on the responsibility of organizing the needed work itself, and then set about directly hiring and training the workers to do that work. We have so far been hindered from taking this obvious step by our fundamentalist ideological mania for free market solutions and private enterprise. This stubborn fixation on private markets and private money is a forlorn ancestral doctrine in America which seems strangely resistant even to the most obvious lessons taught by the catastrophic recent failures of the system of private sector finance. Many Americans are also afflicted by a pathological hatred of the very government of which they themselves are supposed to be the sovereign masters. And where archaic doctrine doesn’t prevail alone, powerful vested interests pick up the slack. Throughout the developed world corporate plutocrats and privileged stakeholders in a failing neoliberal order are working overtime to incapacitate democratic governments, starve them with austerity, and seize political control of their desiccated remains. There is a war going on everywhere between the corporate form of organization based on authoritarian control and elite hierarchy and the democratic form of organization based on shared power, empowered citizenship and the cooperation of equals. Right now, the corporations and plutocrats are winning. The result is systemic failure by democratic societies to grasp and accept their historic responsibilities for active self-governance and bold self-determination. The notion that the private sector mechanisms of free market capitalism are sufficient to meet the emergencies of our time, and to organize and provide all of the work that needs to be done by and for our societies, doesn’t meet the test of either common sense or historical experience. The failing neoliberal world system is beyond wrong: it is a stupid, backward and barbaric system, and the countries who continue practice it inflict needless losses and suffering on their own citizens. So it is time to move on and move forward. We need to revive and renew the public sector, embrace the necessary role of democratic government in setting and achieving large social tasks that the private sector is simply not equipped to handle, and liberate the army of the increasingly desperate unemployed from their indentured dependency on the whims of a dysfunctional and incomplete market system. It is time for the citizens of the world’s democratic countries to make full employment an axiomatic social goal, and to commit the public sectors of their respective countries to the task of providing the work that the private sector cannot or will not provide.
Green Economic Measures=Jobs Green measures would generate net job creation
Bowen and Stern, researchers at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, 1/22/2010
(Alex and Nicholas, "Environmental Policy and the Economic Downturn", CCCEP Paper 16, January 22, 2010, Accessed: 7/3/12, pg 7)AHL
The assessments of ‘green’ measures also reflect a judgement that spending on the transition to the low-carbon economy is likely to increase the demand for labour at a time of high involuntary unemployment. Kammen et al (2006) pointed out that renewable energy industries appear to be more labour intensive than the existing energy sector, particularly at the initial construction, manufacture and installation stage that is most relevant for a short- term fiscal stimulus. Fankhauser et al (2008) concluded from a review of labour intensity estimates in the literature that a shift from high-carbon to low-carbon activities is likely to lead to net job creation, although there is considerable uncertainty about how labour productivity will evolve and about the impact of induced changes elsewhere in the economy. Roland-Holst (2008) provided evidence from California’s lengthy experience of promoting energy efficiency that it has been effective in generating net job creation, taking into account the jobs created by the diversion of spending from energy to other goods and services. Pollins et al (2009), using an industry input-output table approach and assuming widespread unemployment due to deficiency of aggregate demand, argued that US$ 1 million extra spending on clean energy will generate roughly three times more jobs than the equivalent spent on fossil fuel industries, with a larger proportion of low-skill jobs in the skill mix. These results suggest that a switch to clean energy from fossil fuels is likely to be relatively labour intensive. In the long run, that may reduce measured labour productivity, abstracting from the benefits of avoided climate change, but in the short run the switch should be helpful in reducing historically high unemployment rates.8 From the point of view of the environmental objective of halting human-induced climate change, some of the measures proposed were designed to help tackle market failures, particularly in the provision of R&D, and information about energy saving. But, as Houser et al (2009) wrote, “Green recovery efforts will only make a meaningful dent in US emissions if they complement comprehensive climate policy.” The key element of policy missing in the US case, and indeed worldwide, has been comprehensive pricing of greenhouse gas emissions. This Section argues that the global slowdown does not warrant delaying the introduction of emissions pricing, so it is reassuring that, at the time of writing, several countries, including the USA, are considering implementing cap-and-trade schemes. These would greatly amplify the effectiveness of some of the fiscal initiatives, such as tax credit incentives for investment in low-carbon plant and equipment.
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