The corrosive social and economic effects of what have now become ‘normal’ unemployment levels require new solutions, and trade without full employment exacerbates the problem.

Global unemployment is expected to surpass 200 million people for the first time on record by the end of 2017, according a recent ILO study, and limitations of official statistics suggest that the problem is much larger. As conventional measures increasingly fail to produce tight labor markets and jobless recoveries become the norm, economists grapple with this new reality by calling it secular stagnation and by adjusting upwards the rates of unemployment deemed ‘natural’ — but the human, social and economic costs of this growing problem are rarely considered in economic modeling.

The Problem: A Global Unemployment Epidemic

Mainstream economic theory considers some level of unemployment to be ‘natural’ (i.e., unresponsive to policy remedies without creating some other problem like inflation), but it largely ignores the harsh human, environmental, and economic costs of unemployment. In fact, some of the best work on this question comes from disciplines outside of economics.

It’s not hyperbole to note, for example, that unemployment kills. Literally. Research shows that one in five suicides is related to unemployment, and joblessness causes 32–37 percent excess mortality for men. And while for women the impact is less clear, we know that there are robust and lasting negative effects from unemployment on social participation and social capital – all prerequisites for a fulfilling and productive life at home and in the workplace. The deep negative impact of unemployment on individuals’ mental and physical health is well-established. And joblessness has been found to have strong scarring effects on life satisfaction.

The link between crime and unemployment is also well-established. Certain criminal activities vary with the business cycle, and studies have found significant and sizable impact of unemployment on the rates of specific violent and property crimes. The connection between youth unemployment and crime is particularly troubling in the context of the ILO’s findings that 74 million young people are unemployed globally (one third of their overall global unemployment estimate). Other studies suggest that the actual number of jobless youth around the world may be six or seven times the ILO estimates.

Unemployment doesn’t just harm the unemployed. It also harms their children and families. It exacerbates infant mortality, depression, alcohol consumption, and the spread of infectious disease. And joblessness is a root cause of human/child trafficking and global sexual and labor exploitation.

This list only scratches the surface of the insidious effects of unemployment. While the ‘natural’ unemployment rate is embedded in virtually every forecasting model used by government and industry, none of them account for the extraordinary social and economic costs of the epidemic that this ‘natural rate’ actually represents.

The Solution: A Global Marshall Plan for the Unemployed continue reading…

The Levy Institute has completed its most recent medium-term projections for the Greek economy. The outlook, unsurprisingly, isn’t reassuring.

The baseline simulation, which assumes the continuation of current policy, shows the GDP growth rate turning positive in 2017 and reaching 2 percent in 2018. Yet, in a reflection of how much damage has been done by the crisis, even if Greece managed a growth rate around that pace (2.1 percent per year), it would take until 2030 for real GDP to return to its 2006 level. It’s fair to wonder whether such a delayed recovery — with little relief on the horizon for the elevated numbers of poor and unemployed in Greece — is politically and socially sustainable.

And there’s worse news in the report. The baseline generated by the authors’ model for Greece reflects a scenario in which future growth would be export-driven. But this increase in Greek exports would not be generated primarily by price competitiveness (“the price elasticity of Greek exports is low while the income elasticity is high”). That is, the decline of Greek wages — the centerpiece of the official “internal devaluation” strategy — isn’t projected to produce much of a payoff in terms of net exports.

Instead, the rise of exports in this scenario is almost entirely due to assumptions about the economic health of Greece’s trading partners; assumptions taken from the IMF. And as the authors caution, the IMF is likely overstating European growth prospects. So this lost decade-and-a-half for Greece (more, if you’re counting from the onset of the crisis) is actually the “optimistic” scenario.

What can be done? Some of the plans being considered are simply too tame. The authors run a second simulation based on the implementation of a “Juncker Plan”: an increase in public investment for Greece, funded by European institutions, of €1 billion in 2016, €2 billion in 2017, and €3 billion in 2018. The results suggest such a program could help raise GDP growth rates (to -0.4 percent in 2016, 2.9 percent in 2017, and 2.8 percent in 2018), but according to the authors the lag between output and jobs would still leave unemployment too high for too long. Something better targeted, and less reliant on the good will of European institutions, is required. More on that soon.

Read the full Strategic Analysis here and the One-Pager version here.

The “negotiations” that surrounded the latest Greek deal do not reflect well on the system (such as it is) of EMU governance. And there are no silver linings to be found in the outcome of this process. It is a testament to how far we are from “normal” that even the best-case scenario would have left little room for optimism. Even if Greece had received a sensible package — one involving debt restructuring and a pause in austerity — this would still have meant an intolerably long period of high unemployment. (“Even if the Greek economy were to miraculously bounce back to its precrisis growth rate, it would take almost a decade and a half to return to precrisis employment levels.” p. 3 [pdf])

Moreover, the particulars of the Greek situation aside, it is important to recall how far we are from a resolution of the broader eurozone crisis, which will arguably not end until the fundamentally flawed euro setup — of which the Greek crisis is a symptom — is addressed. In this vein, Pavlina Tcherneva recently spoke to Richard Aldous of The American Interest about the latest Greek deal and the “stateless currency” that is the euro (listen to the podcast here).

Tcherneva also touched on an aspect of this broader theme in her recent RT interview. In the clip below she links the “deflationary environment” in the eurozone to the absence of a central fiscal authority:

(See here for a proposal for Greece that aims to [temporarily] relieve the constraints rooted in the divorce of fiscal policy from monetary sovereignty: by funding a direct job creation program through the creation of a parallel currency.)

National animosities and idiosyncratic personalities aside, the blame for the underlying crisis ultimately falls on the very structure of the EMU. This is why it was possible for figures like Wynne Godley to have seen this coming decades ago.

Dean Baker, everyone’s favorite progressive economist (mine, too), has an interesting take on our unemployment problem: Give more paid vacations.

The idea is that if all the employed work less, employers will need to hire the unemployed to produce what the already employed won’t be producing while sunning themselves on Florida’s beaches.

Look, I’m all for shorter workweeks. It is ridiculous that labor’s push somehow got stuck a century ago at the 40-hour workweek in the USA. Employed Americans work more hours per year than just about any other workforce on the planet.

But, as Joan Robinson once declared, the only thing worse than working as a wage slave is to be unemployed. Just ask the Italians, who now have the highest unemployment rate since they started keeping records. Thanks to the EMU and German fiscal rectitude!

I see shorter work days and more paid vacations as a progressive goal to humanize the work place. More time to enjoy one’s family, recreation, and the arts. More time for self-improvement and community involvement. More time for our wage slaves to enjoy the life of leisure long pursued by the leisure classes.

However, last on my list of arguments for a shorter workweek would be the claim that it will create more jobs for the unemployed. continue reading…

Dimitri Papadimitriou, after noting the ongoing failure of austerity policies in Greece, shares the results of a recent study led by Rania Antonopoulos on the effects of implementing direct job creation programs of various sizes in the beleaguered country. In one scenario, a 300,000-job program (in the low-to-medium-sized range of the  policy options examined) would have reduced the ranks of the unemployed, once the likely multiplier effects are taken into account, by 30 percent if the program had been implemented in 2012, and GDP would have been increased by 4 percent. And the cost?

To run this impressive game-changer, Greece would have to net spend a little over 1 percent of its GDP. That’s a relatively modest stimulus. Other nations, when faced with hard times that didn’t come close to the distress in Greece today, have launched stimulus programs that were far larger. Germany and Brazil invested 4 percent of GDP, the U.S. 5 percent, and China invested 13 percent of GDP.

The program could feasibly be funded by a dedicated EU employment fund, the issuance of special-purpose tax-backed zero coupon bonds, or a temporary suspension of sovereign debt interest payments. Even if the government borrowed the funds, the debt-to-GDP ratio, the measure of health most important to European leadership and financial markets, would improve.

In case you didn’t catch that: investing in a direct job creation program of this size, even if it were funded by increased borrowing (not the best approach, according the authors), would still actually reduce the size of Greece’s public debt relative to its economy — something troika policy has so far failed to accomplish — because the economy would be growing faster than the debt. And the bigger the program, the greater the debt-ratio-reduction effect: had Greece implemented a 550,000-job program in 2012, its debt-to-GDP ratio would have declined by 9 percentage points — all in the course of reducing unemployment in Greece by nearly two-thirds.

Read the rest of Papadimitriou’s article here.

For the study in question, see: “Responding to the Unemployment Challenge: A Job Guarantee Proposal for Greece“

The chart above documents another striking feature of the impact of the recession on Greece.

The Hellenic Statistical Authority (ElStat) has recently released the new quarterly data on employment and the labor force, which includes a measure of the population aged 15 or more (Table 1). While the series published in the previous release exhibited a stable upward trend (reported in green in the chart), the new estimates show that population peaked at 9.437 million at the end of 2008, and then started declining, reaching 9.296 million in the first quarter of this year, i.e. it went back to its 2004 level. (The reasons for the change in the series are due to ElStat incorporating the latest census data: details are available in the ElStat web site).

As ElStat does not publish an up-to-date measure of net migration, we assume this could be measured by the distance between the pre-crisis population trend and the actual values. We therefore computed a simple linear trend on the 2001-2008 data, which shows that population would have now been at 9.686 million, had the previous trend continued. The difference between this value and the population reported for the first quarter of 2014 is thus approximately 390,000 people (4 percent).

ElStat makes available the detail by age groups (Table 2), reported in our second chart, which shows that younger Greeks are declining steadily in number – a trend which is common to many developed countries who chose to reduce the average number of kids per family – while the number of older people is steadily increasing – again a trend common to many countries, linked to longer life expectancy. Summing up the 15-29 groups to the 45+ groups, we find that the decline in the younger population accelerated after 2007, compensating the increase in the number of Greeks aged 45 and over, so that the inverted U-shape of the population in our first chart can largely be attributed to the decline in Greek residents aged 30-44, who are now 2.442 million against a peak of 2.544 million at the end of 2008.

We have no complete information to know if this decrease is due to Greeks in this age cohort migrating abroad, or to a smaller number of immigrants. However, the OECD migration database contains some (incomplete) statistics on immigrants by country (the figures largely under-estimate total migration, as some major European countries such as France and Italy do not report any figures to the OECD).

As the next chart shows, and how it should be expected looking at the respective unemployment rates, the main destination of Greek emigrants is Germany, and the number of migrants has almost doubled from 2010 to 2011 (the last available year).

The other portion of the fall in population is given by migrants to Greece, which have fallen from 65.3 thousands in 2005 to 33.3 thousands in 2010 and 23.2 thousands in 2011.

It is to be expected that migration of Greeks abroad, and the decline in immigrants to Greece, continued on the same paths after 2011, given the size of the unemployment rate in Greece (still at 26.8 percent in March 2014, seasonally adjusted). Using the economists’ jargon, this is another loss of human capital for the Greek economy which will make a recovery more difficult. And, in addition, balance of payments statistics published from the Bank of Greece do not show any improvements in payments made from abroad which could be related to migrants’ remittances: both the compensation of employees received by Greece from abroad, and current transfers to the private sector have actually declined since the beginning of the crisis.

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by a political economy which revolves around finance capital, is based on a savage form of free market fundamentalism, and thrives on a wave of globalizing processes and global financial networks that have produced global economic oligarchies with the capacity to influence the shaping of policymaking across nations.

As a result, contemporary advanced capitalist societies are plagued by dangerous levels of income and wealth inequality, mass unemployment, rising poverty rates, social polarization, and collapsing social provisions. Furthermore, democracy and the social contract are under constant attack by the current system and there is an ongoing pressure by the corporate and financial elite to convert all public goods and services into private goods and services.

The rising inequality in advanced capitalist countries is well documented. Most recently, Thomas Piketty’s publishing sensation Capital in the Twentieth-First Century, translated into English and published by Harvard University Press, provides massive data showing a widening gap between the rich and the poor, thus questioning not only the claim that the capitalist economy works for all but also underscoring the point of how dangerous the current system is to democracy itself. Indeed, a few years ago, Larry M. Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, published by Princeton University Press, pointed to the same gap between the rich and poor in the United States under Republican administrations.

The way wealth has changed in the United States over the last few decades, with those in Generation X and Generation Y accumulating “less wealth than their parents did at the same age 25 years ago”, is also demonstrated in a study produced by Eugene Steuerle, et. al. on behalf of the Urban Institute in Washington DC. And in a recent Strategic Analysis released just this past spring by the Levy Economics Institute with the title “Is Rising Inequality a Hindrance to the US Economic Recovery?”, the authors, Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, et al., demonstrate through macro modeling simulations that the current processes of inequality in the United States are unsustainable and that, if they continue, will result in weak growth and increased unemployment.    

As for the problem of mass unemployment, the facts speak for themselves. continue reading…

Economic pundits who predicted the collapse of the euro at the start of the eurozone crisis have been proven wrong. But those who say the crisis is over are equally wrong.

Four years after the start of the euro crisis, the bailed-out countries of the eurozone (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) are still facing serious problems, as the austerity policies imposed on them by the European Union (EU) authorities and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) not only failed to stabilize their economies, but actually made matters worse; in fact, much worse: the debt load increased substantially, national output was seriously undermined, unemployment reached potentially explosive levels, a credit crunch ensued, and emigration levels rose to historic heights. Because of these highly adverse effects, the citizens in the bailed-out countries have grown indignant and mistrustful toward parliamentary democracy itself, euroskepticism has taken firm roots, and a cleavage has reemerged between north and south.

Take unemployment, for example. The current unemployment rates in the four bailed-out eurozone countries are: 27 percent for Greece; 25 percent for Spain; 15 percent for Portugal; and 12 percent for Ireland, the nation with the highest emigration rate in all of Europe, and whose government was actually asking the unemployed recently to leave and take jobs in other European countries.

A similarly dramatic picture emerges when one looks at current government debt. In Greece, it ballooned from slightly less than 130 percent in 2009 to 175 percent at the end of 2013 and it still growing. Ireland’s public debt, which stood at 25 percent of GDP in 2008, grew to nearly 65 percent by 2010 and climbed to over 125 percent by the end of 2013. Portugal’s public debt, which was slightly less than 70 percent in 2008, jumped to over 100 percent by 2011 and then to over 130 percent by 2013. And Spain’s public debt has surged to nearly 95 percent of GDP, standing at close to 1 trillion euros—three times as much as it was at the start of the crisis in 2008—and is projected to go over 100 percent by the end of 2014.

In short, the rest of the bailed-out eurozone countries are looking more and more like Greece when it comes to public debt—the result of the “voodoo” economics that the witch doctors of the EU and the IMF cooked up in order to formulate the so-called “rescue” plans.

The prospects for real growth in the periphery of the eurozone are grim as the EU’s current economic mindset, a set of economic dogmas that include (1) relegating unemployment to the status of a natural and inevitable (and perhaps even desirable) outcome of fiscal adjustment, (2) relying on austerity as a confidence builder, (3) treating structural reform as a panacea and (4) valuing exports as the primary engine of growth trump serve to impede recovery.

Each one of these ideas, as I spell out in detail in a public policy brief that was just released by the Levy Economics Institute, are highly flawed and, when combined, they can be deadly dangerous. They constitute tenets of an ideological “worldview” rather than empirically proven statements. continue reading…

Pavlina Tcherneva participated in a conference on youth unemployment at Middlebury College and shared her ideas for a youth employment safety net (beginning at 38:45):