Can you talk about unemployment through the MMT lens?

I don't really wanna go through the theory of the creation of a monetary system causing unemployment, but we don't need to tolerate involuntary unemployment or underemployment or, for that matter, insecure employment.

And another great paper that Patricia has done recently, this time through MMT UK, was about the design of a national job guarantee in the UK, not as something compulsory that people would need to participate in or they would lose something, but as an option, a public option which doesn't exist at the moment, so that if somebody wishes to work towards the betterment of their local community through a variety of means, we're not short of ideas in terms of what they can do.

They ought to be able to turn up at an employment office and participate in one of those programs and be paid whatever i- is decided socially to be an appropriate minimum social wage for doing so with opportunities for, for training or with links to local employers.

So this could be a transition job into employment later on, but if you want to be working on maintaining or restoring the natural environment or contributing to your local community in one way or another, then you should have the option of doing so.

And if we were to introduce such a program as this, which wouldn't actually have a huge impact on the national budget in normal times, but at the margin would set the government's fiscal position at an appropriate level to bring about non-inflationary full employment or a form of full employment, then people would be able to participate.

And, uh, actually, I think under those circumstances, very few of those young people that you were just talking about, if they had friends who had significantly more money than them and were doing something interesting and useful and engaging, where they could see that they were making a positive contribution to the community in which they lived and that they were being respected for it, very few of them would remain involuntarily unemployed under those circumstances.

And I saw Andrew Bailey talk about how pointing to the yields, and as you say, the bank can control the yields if it wished to at any horizon, but then, uh, the bank is now undertaking QT, and that QT is pushing up bond yields, and then Andrew Bailey points to those bond yields to lecture the government on fiscal sustainability.