Must-Read:I really do not like the “too many workers” framing: I vastly prefer either:
- Too little public investment
- Too little government purchases
- Too little government debt
- Too little risk-bearing capacity
- Too little in the way of safe assets for savers to hold
But the argument seems 100% right to me:
: The world has too many workers. Here’s one way to fix it: “overcomplicating America’s economic challenges today…
…Maybe the problem is simple: too many workers. That is the argument made in a new paper released by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, which theorizes that the world economy is suffering from an oversupply of labor and too little demand for the goods and services those workers produce…. Daniel Alpert… [makes] Third Way’s latest effort to shape the liberal policy conversation in the 2016 presidential primaries. It does so in decidedly un-centrist fashion — by embracing a larger infrastructure spending program than Bernie Sanders does….
Alpert laments the ‘suddenness and extent of the integration of over 3 billion people into a global capitalist market, that really only hitherto consisted of about 800 million in the advanced economies.’ He argues that worker influx has triggered a wave of low-wage job creation in America. He notes that nearly half of the jobs created in the current recovery have come in traditionally low-wage sectors…. Intervening, he says, requires a ‘bold change in policy focus’ for the United States. Which is to say, a $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending program, at a time when Congress remains dead set against big new spending plans. Alpert estimates it would create 5.5 million jobs….
It might seem an unusual position for a centrist think-tank, outflanking the most liberal presidential candidate on the left. But Third Way officials argue it’s an economic imperative. ‘Whether it’s through some sort of spending deal, where you’re getting more money into infrastructure, or repatriation or some other means, you have to get this done’ in Congress, said Jim Kessler, the group’s senior vice president for policy. ‘That glut of worldwide labor is not going to go away, magically.’