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Direct Job Creation in America with Steven Attewell
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Maxximilian Seijo: As you're just mentioning there, in your book, you foreground what you call "the politics of direct job creation" and you trace this throughout the 20th century. We were wondering if you could perhaps talk about how this history and foregrounding it complicates our historical memory of what's imaginable.
Steven Attewell: Yeah, that's a great question. I think the main thing is we have a vision in our collective political imagination of the way our system of social and economic policies is supposed to work. This is social security. This is the welfare state. This is what the federal government does to manage the economy. And there's this giant missing hole in terms of how everything is supposed to work. For example, one of the things that blew my mind when I started is that direct job creation was built into the social security plan. It was always supposed to have this like extra leg to the stool, this extra safety net under the safety net to catch everybody. And it's not there. And the fact that it's not there explains a lot of the problems in our welfare state, like why people slip through the cracks, why our system is not as generous as it ought to be. Likewise, on the economic policy side, why is it that the United States is, even in its golden age of the 40s through the 70s in terms of the economy, why is it that we had higher unemployment than the whole of Western Europe? It's because there was this missing part. We had a plan for what the post-war world should look like and then we didn't execute it. And as a result, we have this huge vulnerability. When there's a sudden downturn in the economy and mass unemployment, we have these very indirect tools to deal with it that take a while to go into effect. And whether or not you've put enough resources into them is very uncertain. It's missing this additional lever. That really complicates our understanding of what the state should look like.
To me, the next thing that it complicates, we have this popular conception that World War II ended the Great Depression. And that the New Deal failed to end the Great Depression. And that plays a big part in our historical imagination of what is possible, of what the government can do and can't do. Why do people say, "Oh, the government can't create jobs or the president can't really directly affect the economy"? It's because we have this false impression that we tried these programs and they failed. The reality is they succeeded enormously. But that really complicates our understanding of the world. Because what it gets at, fundamentally, is that unemployment is unnecessary. We are a rich enough and powerful enough country that we can have whatever unemployment rate we want. It's just that for whatever reason, we have decided to have high levels of unemployment.
Steven Attewell is adjunct professor of Public Policy at the City University of New York's School of Labor and Urban Studies. His recent book, People Must Live By Work (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the history of direct job creation programs from the depths of the Great Depression and debates over the Employment Act of 1946 to the War on Poverty and the Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978.
