Many thanks Jamie and congratulations on a first rate book!

Thank you and thanks to Bev for her great work!

A true pleasure. Jamie’s book is really worth the time and will be valuable for my students as well.

Best,

Max

Despite the terrible suffering, there are many lessons for the US in the austerity madness and debates raging in the EU PIIGS today.

Its a good point. the best , greenest smartest safest from export jobs are fixing and maintaining. We do very little, its wasteful and highly inefficient

Your definition is interesting. That is not generally the same definition used at The Fed, Treasury, CBO, BLS

Most of these policies and trajectories are more than a single bill in the making. That said I prefer the following terminology the owership society and the servant economy

Fair enough. There is an economic structure problem that Krugman, Summers at el are not usually focused on:

We have vast coming gaps where folks developed skills and clustered to work in around speculative finance, housing and retail. That stuff is not coming back and with no re-training, green jobs, public tech, transit, industrial policy, these folks will be classed structurally unemployed by BLS models for years.

I agree. I think there is an unfortunate impulse by many to just try what worked last time despite the mountain of evidence that the context and economy is radically different. We need new progressive plans that factor significantly different circumstances and changed players.

Our recent debates on abortion/contraception are a moral, historical, economic and gender equality affront to modernity and progress on every level

I think the lack of structural analysis is a big part of the problem. Its hard to call unemployment cyclical when it slowly grows across 5 business cycles? If you take the standard terms that would leave you with season and frictional. I doubt you like that better?

I have followed JOBS closely:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577281844105719500.html

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm

trends in general and youth labor force participation are very alarming in the US of late. Friday’s job report highlights the following teen unemployment rates for March 2012: 20.5% White, 30.5% Latino, 40.5% African American.

How are our inequalities contributing to this structural labor market instability for the young?

I’m not sure I know what ” the program” is. Sorry. Its worth keeping in mind that less than 60% of the population is employed so employing everyone would not be necessary or likely? Simple nationalization involves altered ownership/Part of the value of Jamie’s book is a look at economic structures.

We have gone very far, by international and historical standards, to deregulate and lower redistributive tax/regulation. The question is a partial return to the New Deal/ Great Society type policy or a return to a more 19th and early 20th Century economy with huge returns to wealth and endemic instability for the 90% non-wealthy

Ryan’s budget is actually part of a larger struggle over if we need to switch course or offer more aggressive versions of the policy trajectory we have been on since the mid 1970s.

Government monies were/are used to subsidize many jobs. Its a question more of which jobs, doing what and under what policy and wage structure. Government monies are not fixed but vary with growth, tax rates and tax collection levels

Hi Bill,
Always a pleasure to have a chance to exchange thoughts and ideas. Thank you

The differences between redistributive and growth oriented policies have profound cumulative effects

It is interesting that higher speculative asset returns aid in the pension funding area while increasing inequalities more generally

I spent many months in Greece and the transformations are coming fast and strong.
Is there as lesson for the US with 500,000 public sector job losses at the state and local level 2009-2010?