Steven Attewell. People Must Live by Work

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Edward Markey released their proposal for a Green New Deal in February 2019, one of the pillars of the program was the “job guarantee”—a proposal that the federal government would be legally obligated to provide work to anyone seeking employment on the massive public projects needed to move the American economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels. Like many aspects of the ambitious proposal, the notion of the job guarantee quickly came in for mockery from conservatives as too expensive, too wasteful, and unrealistically generous. Steven Attewell’s People Must Live by Work: Direct Job Creation in America, from FDR to Reagan, a history of “direct job creation” in twentieth-century America, provides much-needed context for these debates—which have new salience in 2020 given the rise in unemployment due to the economic effects of the coronavirus. This history, which treats the evolution of a particular policy through the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and the 1970s, makes the case that federal jobs programs are not unprecedented in American history, that they have often been successful when allowed to function, and that they have not held a more central role in federal policy as much because of liberal ambivalence as conservative hostility.

Context (archaeology) · Economic growth · Economics · Government (linguistics) · Job creation · Labour economics · New Deal · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Salience (neuroscience) · Sociology · Unemployment · Work (physics) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies