Work and Income as Economic Rights

In this video, Pavlina Tcherneva and Philip Harvey look at the job guarantee and basic income grant proposals in the context of a discussion of economic rights.

Tcherneva begins with the theory behind the job guarantee — a federally-funded (and in Tcherneva’s version, locally-administered) program that would offer a paid job to anyone willing and able to work — and then (16:10) turns to a real-world example that, while not quite a job guarantee, was in the family of direct job creation programs: Argentina’s Plan Jefes. (Tcherneva has a related working paper that analyzes the socially transformative potential of direct job creation, over and above its macroeconomic stabilization benefits, in the context of the alteration of Plan Jefes into a pure cash transfer program, Plan Familias.)

Philip Harvey (31:45) looks at the legal bases of the rights to work and income (beginning with US statutes) before moving on to a comparison of basic income guarantees with job guarantees:

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This talk was delivered as part of Columbia’s “Modern Money” series; you can find links to background reading for this seminar here.