I have already commented on creating narratives this morning. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been doing that in this film. I do not apologise for sharing it.
The presentation may grate a bit: it is very American.
It may seem irritatingly optimistic.
Some policy detail may not seem necessary: why not a universal basic income if people no longer need to make ‘stuff' we do not need?
But I think exercise like this are worthwhile. We change the world by the stories we tell. And we all tell stories, all the time. So why not one of political hope? We desperately need just that at present.
The world we live on is under threat: our chance of survival here is far from guaranteed. But we are told by those with the best available knowledge that we can still improve those odds.
And the simple fact is that money is no obstacle to achieving that goal: all the money we need to deliver the process of change is available without limit if we want it. It won't even create inflation if spending it puts resources to use.
So I share this video because it is a message of hope. We need a decade of the Green New Deal in the US in the 2020s. We need it here too, and around the world as well. We have to believe it possible. The alternative is thinking it impossible. And that would be to admit failure for all the generations to come, without exception, because many might not even exist.
So tell the story: this is a story we have to tell. There is no other.
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… we need a Job Guarantee at a living wage… UBI would just cause inflation…
No it would not
That’s a falsehood
Roger Stokes says:
“… we need a Job Guarantee at a living wage… UBI would just cause inflation…”
Yes it could…..but we can have inflation without a UBI and have it all the time to some extent…..so although I’m coming round to thinking a Job Guarantee is possibly a better way way forward than UBI the reasoning has bugger-all to do with the inflation bogey-man.
No government policy ever invented can work if it is implemented stupidly, or with malign intent. Not even a Job Guarantee. As an economic policy Hitler’s National Socialism had a great deal going for it, but it was wrecked by the malign aspects of its political intentions.
Politics will always trump economics. We need politicians working for the whole of society and its welfare. But the way we select and elect them we so often get psychopaths and sociopaths. It doesn’t take many of that ilk to corrupt an entire polity and the society it governs. And they are very difficult to shift.
Richard, thank you for this. There is a big groundswell here in Newcastle from local school and college students and from many of us supporting the Labour candidate for North of Tyne mayor, Jamie Driscoll. A very well-attended, enthusiastic meeting on the Green Industrial Revolution was held here a couple of weeks ago, addressed by local MP Chi Onwura, Driscoll, outside guests and Rebecca Long-Bailey (remotely because required in London for the Brexit talks). I am preparing for my next ward meeting on this topic, with guests from the local school protesters, and I will use this film. You are absolutely right that we need stories, and this is a good one.
I utterly oppose the idea of a GIR
That is materialism
The GND has to be anything but that
Is there a definition of Green Industrial Revolution? Might it not be developing renewables, electric transport, retrofitting homes with insulation and building carbon neutral new homes? De-industrialising agriculture an returning to an organic farming revolution?
The trouble is that it is industry and not services
And material and not-decarbon
And so the whole message is wrong
I utterly oppose the idea of a GIR [Green Industrial Revolution]
Doesn’t that depend on what we define as ‘industry’ ?
I share your suspicion that a Labour Party vision of GIR is post-war industry, but a bit cleaner. I can’t see that taking us anywhere useful. Fifty years ago it would have represented progress, but now it looks deeply reactionary.
We have the term GND
Let’s use it
“We have the term GND [Green New Deal] Let’s use it.”
Indeed. Why must Labour try to reinvent the wheel and replace it with logs as rollers. 🙁
Building Stonehenge was very clever, but they never did get the roof on it.
I was unfamiliar with the term GIR until used here. In terms of what needs to happen to move to a zero-carbon society: a colossal build out of renewables – which will require the steel industry (amongst others) to de-carbonise fast – this can be accomplished through eliminating the export of scrap steel (put it through arc furnaces supplied with green electricity) and the conversion of primary steel capacity to hydrogen-reduction (with the H2 produced by off-shore wind for example). The cement industry is another that will need to change radically. Is this funded by GND? could it be called GIR? Does it matter?
At a consumer level, a move away from buy/use/scrap after 10? 12? 15? years (certainly in the case of white goods) and design for field-maintenance. The tech to build a fridge that lasts 200 years exists now – lets do it (this is an example of manufacturing moving to services).
The concept of re-use could extend to a very wide range of supposedly “durable” products. Example: bicycles now seem to be fashion items – what happens to all those carbon frames after 10 years? Is there something the matter with metal? Example: the use of batteries in devices that do not really need them: a battery powered robot lawnmower – really?
Consumerism needs to come to an end – fast.
I agree on this – but I have always felt consumerism an evil to well being
Stop being so stoked up Mr Stokes.
UBI at the levels I have seen would not cause inflation. Benefits/social security of any kind is not known to cause inflation.
It is the inflation of asset prices that causes inflation – because money has been chasing the wrong thing – returns in monetary form – not social or environmental.
We do have all the money we need but it is where we choose to put it that matters.
(Real) Money creation can be rather like metal work: you heat the metal to form it – but never enough to destroy it and then you cool it off, stabilise it and there it is – something of use.
The present asset based system never cools off – it overheats and you’ve got meltdown usually because much of the transactions are using debt – not real money.
It is the cooling off that matters and the cooling off system in real money creation is an effective tax system which we also do not have at the moment.
Face it: it’s time for something new.
Thanks
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
Mostly I agree PSR. It’s what we do with the ‘money’ that matters.
“The present asset based system never cools off — it overheats and you’ve got meltdown usually because much of the transactions are using debt — not real money.”
I think there’s a trap here…. It’s not ‘using’ debt that causes the problem, the problem is caused by ABUSING debt.
It’s the speculative abuse of debt that that brings the system to collapse, cranking-up asset prices where they bear no relation to value. I don’t think this has anything to do with ‘real money’. There is no such thing as ‘real money’.
Money is a fiction; an accounting convention. Gold bugs think gold is real money, but that’s just a different fiction which happens to be older but no less false.
Andy
‘Real money’ is what I would call base money – it is money that is free of interest, therefore even though all money is debt, ‘real money’ is the interest free version.
Yes, the government can raise money from bonds too, but I’m talking about fiat money – money that is made because the decision has been made to make it so for a particular purpose (historically the wrong ones, but I don’t thing any of our bailed out banks have paid back QE yet plus interest have they?)
We know that debt destroys the value of money. So if we are going to kick off a new GND economy, lets not shackle it with interest payments or financial dividends as it might be if done through the private sector.
I always think of how the West welcomed a new, open Russia by giving it a big loan to pay back. Stupid. And typical. And what about poor old Africa?
But also – look – money does exist right? It is legal tender. We use it to exchange it for stuff.
Can we do that without it? No. Let’s keep out feet on the ground here.
Love the graphic presentation, but the baby-voice commentary doesn’t do it for me.
In fact I find it annoying, though there’s not a great deal wrong with the text.
That’s her voice….
“That’s her voice….”
It doesn’t sound like the one she uses in congress.
Reflecting on GND and why it has not been more enthusiastically taken up by political parties, the media, let alone the public, one would have to conclude that it is still a the subject of discussion amongst a very narrow group of enthusiasts (including myself). Wandering across Waterloo Bridge and talking to the ExtReb folk, I wasn’t too clear that they were too clear about it either (shades of Occupy…).
GND is of course about much more than climate change – its about tackling flaws in the underlying economic model of which climate change is arguably a major symptom. However, even climate change and ‘economic models’ are pretty abstract to the bulk of the public. Let alone MMT. Even if they are aware, there is a lot of cognitive dissonance around where behaviour is less than consistent with professed beliefs (I’ll own up to that…)
The missed opportunity for me is that GND addresses many issues that are more tangible and immediate to the public. Rebuilding decaying infrastructure, building and rebuilding housing, creating new skills, jobs and ‘industries’, moving investment and employment out to areas that have been neglected, pushing power over those decisions back out to cities and regions.
Its not a new problem – environmentalists who suggested that everyone needed to wear hair shirts, eat lentils and live in caves did not really help the cause. The Daily Mash put it rather more humorously:
https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/environment-could-have-been-saved-years-ago-if-protesters-didnt-look-like-twats-20190416184739
I’m a big believer in the potential and relevance of GND. We have to get much better at communicating its relevance to issues that people can relate to
Agreed
Inspiring stuff. I can’t get enough of Ocasio-Cortez, I think she’s brilliant. Desperately need an equivalent on this side of the pond!
” why not a universal basic income if people no longer need to make ‘stuff’ we do not need?”
Because a currency is only worth what people need to do to obtain it, so if the currency issuer just gives everybody a big amount of currency unconditionally, the currency isn’t worth much.
If, on the other hand, an hour of labour in a Job Guarantee job is what you need to do to earn 25 Australian dollars, there is a price anchor for the currency.
Pavlina Tcherneva, Randall Wray, and Scott Fullwiler have done a lot of work on the macroeconomic implications of a UBI. Their conclusion is that a UBI would be prone to accelerating inflation.
Oh dear…..we created £435 billion for the benefit of bankers
Did the currency collapse?
No?
Why don’t you just admit what you really despise is the idea that we can use money to set most people free, and you are really, really frightened of that idea?
Randall Wray is a thoughtful economist.. I think Nicholas was probably expressing the opinion of Randall more than his own..if you really support your arguments with conviction then having a forum with the likes of Randall will offer real credibility whereas arguing on a blog with random posters offers very little..
Serious like his co-author Bill Mitchell, whose response to a comment I made on the insufficiency (in my opinion) of their discussion on tax in their new book was one word -which was ‘liar’? You mean, that serious?
No thanks, in that case
UBI is a bad idea because it is macroeconomically unstable. It has no inflation control built into it. It doesn’t directly add to productive capacity, but it directly adds a lot to demand.
If the Australian Government replaced all existing social security and welfare spending with a UBI set at $21,700 (the maximum base rate for the pension) per year for every Australian citizen and permanent migrant aged 15 years and over (20.2 million people), it would be necessary for the federal government to increase its total spending by well over 50 percent. To put that into context, the federal government spends about $490 billion per year in total. To make the extra spending non-inflationary, it would be necessary to double the GST, and increase every marginal income tax rate by 10 to 15 percentage points, and scrap all existing tax deductions (including the tax deductions for superannuation). These estimates are from an economist called Steven Hail at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/a-job-guarantee-a-better-cheaper-alternative-to-the-greens-ubi,11486
Obviously it would be an uphill struggle to sell that magnitude of tax increases to voters, and frankly it wouldn’t be worth doing because of the macroeconomic problems with a UBI.
It is much better to target a generous Basic Income at people of retirement age, people who are sick or injured, and people with disabilities.
Guarantee good quality employment to all who want it. Increase the quality of all jobs by providing a good public option for jobs.
Guarantee good quality public services and public infrastructure to everyone.
Those are things that are worth guaranteeing to everyone, and that can be guaranteed without causing the macroeconomic problems of a UBI.
UBI doesn’t challenge the commodification of vast swathes of our social and cultural lives.
In that sense, UBI isn’t ambitious enough. It doesn’t challenge the neoliberal logic of treating the individual consumer as the most important unit in society.
There are many problems that require solutions that are public, collective, and shared. Those are the problems that a government is supposed to address. A UBI is not that kind of solution. A UBI is based on the myth that our problems are fundamentally private and individualistic in character.
There is no point in guaranteeing everyone a certain income if people don’t actually get decent public services and infrastructure and can’t afford decent housing and can’t get decent employment when they want it.
Guarantee the services and the infrastructure to everyone; guarantee good quality employment to all who want it; and provided a targeted Basic Income for people of retirement age and for people with constraints on their capacity to work.
That is a much better approach than UBI.
I somehow missed this: apologies.
Although I am not very apologetic. I note the first para. Do you we only spend to add to economic capacity? Really? Is that what the state is for? Simply to increase GDP?
I do rather think you have missed the whole point of the debate on either UBI or JG is you think that is the case.
You are the person commodifying the economy by subscribing to a neoliberal notion of worth.
I’d go away and do some rethinking if I was you.