Episode 14 – Breaking The Chains of Oppression with Prof. Sandy Darity

Macro N Cheese – Episode 14
Breaking The Chains of Oppression with Prof. Sandy Darity
May 4, 2019

Sandy Darity [intro/music] (00:02):

Essentially, what the federal job guarantee would do is create a set of jobs that are sufficiently well compensated so that it sets the floor on the compensation that all workers would receive in the United States.

Sandy Darity [intro/music] (00:19):

You know, the very first thing Barack Obama should have done as the new president of the United States was develop a massive employment program in the face of the great recession. And that was not his priority.

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (00:39):

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

Steve Grumbine (01:34):

All right. This is Steve with Real Progressives. A gentlemen that I have not had the pleasure of meeting and have not had the pleasure of actually talking to, Dr. William Sandy Darity of Duke University. Professor Darity was a partner in a phenomenal writeup in Jacobin magazine.

This was on the job guarantee and it spoke volumes to me in what was particularly insightful was that they laid out five key bullet points for why a federal job guarantee was superior and would be a boon for America, for the people, and for solving destitution, quite frankly. So without further ado, I would like to bring on my guest, Dr. Sandy Darity. Welcome, sir. How are you today?

Darity (02:29):

Fine. Thank you. Glad to have the opportunity to talk with you.

Grumbine (02:32):

Well, I am like literally overwhelmed with joy that I’ve been able to get you on here. We had to do it a little bit out of sorts here, but it is worth every second. So let me ask you, can you please, just for the people that aren’t familiar with you, you please just give a little history of who you are, where you come from and what drives your work and your activism?

Darity (02:55):

So I’m an economist by training, but I went Into economics for a somewhat unusual reason in comparison with others in my field. I have always been concerned about problems of inequality and poverty.

And I made the assumption that economics was the discipline where you could learn about why people were poor or why there was great inequality in the world between countries, between individuals, between social groups. And then I started taking economics classes and I concluded that I didn’t really like the answers that the economists gave to why those conditions existed.

So with the hubris of youth, I decided to become an economist so I could try to change the way in which economists thought about these issues. So, yeah, obviously I haven’t done that, but I think people are, are taking much more seriously a set of ideas that I’ve worked on in collaboration with some other like-minded scholars to introduce a set of social policies that I think would have a major positive impact on the problems of poverty and inequality.

Grumbine (04:03):

All right. So in reading the article that you, Mark and Darrick Hamilton, Mark Hall and Darrick Hamilton put together, tell me real quickly, what is it about the job guarantee that made you guys step back and say, ” This is something that we really need to investigate; this seems to be something that has a lot of merit?”

Darity (04:25):

So from my perspective, and I’m not sure if, if Mark and Darrick would give exactly the same answer, but from my perspective, the key thing is a recognition that people are out of work because there’s not an adequate number of jobs for them. It’s not because of their personal deficiencies or defects. It’s not because they’re dysfunctional.

It’s not because they’re undertrained or undereducated. So what I’ve been saying lately is that first the US economy as a whole doesn’t generate enough jobs to meet the needs of folks who are seeking employment. And it’s very striking that at the trial of the great recession, there were 6.6 job seekers for every new job opening in the US economy.

Now we’re in a considerably more prosperous moment, but there still is a situation in which there’s 1.1 job seekers per every job that’s generated in the US economy. And I’m talking about all jobs, jobs that are not just generated by the private sector, but also public sector employment. And so, in fact, it’s quite clear that the private sector never generates enough jobs to meet the needs of the folks in the US economy.

We’ve got about 153 million people at work now. And out of that, about 25 million of those jobs are public sector jobs at all levels – local, state and municipal. So the public sector is actually responsible in a direct way for in excess of 15 to 20% of all the jobs that are offered in the American economy.

So the job guarantee is advancing the principle that since that’s already the case, let’s make sure that everyone in the US who wants a job can have one through the public sector. The other point I’d like to make here is, of course, in addition to being concerned about the quantity of jobs, we have to be concerned about the quality of them.

So it is, disturbingly, the case that close to half of individuals who are houseless in the United States have a job, but it simply doesn’t pay them enough to be able to have a more secure and safe living environment.

And similarly, we know that we have a deep problem of what we’ve we typically refer to as working poverty, which is a situation in which people are at work, they may be working full time, but their incomes are too low for them to cross the poverty threshold.

And so the job guarantee is an idea that everybody’s assured of employment, but we also will design the compensation for those jobs in such a way that they’re offering people wages above the poverty level. So it’s simultaneously a direct way to get full employment and also a way to eliminate working poverty.

Grumbine (07:24):

What I’m going to do real quickly. I want to just take a crack and I know I’m not expecting you to have this total recall here, but you gave out, like I said, five points. One was a job guarantee means fewer poor Americans. Two, the robots haven’t taken over yet. We still need workers. And three, a federal job guarantee could build an inclusive economy. I love that one.

And then fourth one was federal jobs could provide socially useful goods and services. And then the last one, which I love, because this is the cornerstone of what we preach here is it’ll stabilize the economy. So why don’t we start at the top one here momentarily and just talk through that. I think it’s very, very nicely packaged so that a job guarantee means fewer poor Americans. Let’s start there.

Darity (08:21):

One of the fundamental premises behind the version of the job guarantee that I’ve been working on with people like Darrick (Hamilton) and with Mark (Paul) and with Alan Aja and Anne Price and Daniel Bustillo, the version that we’ve developed is one that’s predicated on the view that the public sector should act as a competitor with the private sector for the provision of employment.

So that essentially what the federal job guarantee would do is create a set of jobs that are sufficiently well compensated so that it sets the floor on the compensation that all workers would receive in the United States.

And individuals who might be self-employed could make a judgment as to whether or not they wanted to, at least for some period of time, take the public sector job that would have a lower risk of a flow of income.

But at other times they could choose to work on their own independently but there would be, in some sense, a safety net, a true safety net in the sense that anybody could seek a public sector job at any moment in time, whenever they felt the need for that type of work. And we would prevent people from falling into poverty.

Our existing antipoverty system is one in which people have to be exposed to poverty before they get any kinds of protections or benefits. But the premise behind the federal job guarantee is that we’re going to try to prevent people from being exposed to poverty in the first place.

Grumbine (09:55):

Okay. So when you look around and you see the way inequality is in America, it is so stark. When you, when I drive through some of our urban centers, especially here in Pennsylvania, and I know in the district in Baltimore, my goodness, and you can go all over the country.

I’m sure in all around the world, quite frankly, you can see condensed populations that are severely constrained, very high prices, the cost of living on top of very, very scarce jobs with highly competitive markets, even for the most low level blue collar unskilled labor. This right here immediately provides mobility as well. Correct?

I mean, this is an opportunity to, you know, I often think of Flint, Michigan, and I say, you know what? You’re not going to fix our water pipes. You’re not going to take care of our streets. You’re not going to provide me an opportunity. My kids are going to have to go into an alternative economy. Dammit, I’m picking up and I’m leaving. I’m going somewhere where there’s fresh water. And I’m going to have my federal job waiting for me when I get there.

Darity (10:58):

Yes. I mean, it gives people an exit option out of poor jobs if they’re holding a bad job. And it gives them an exit option potentially out of the location where they’re living, if that location is not meeting their needs.

Grumbine (11:12):

So your second point in your article spoke to the robots haven’t taken over yet. We still need workers. And I think one of the things that you and I were talking about on Twitter was the fact that we haven’t seen an increase in productivity that would constitute the efficiencies of automation.

They’re not replacing workers with automation, they’re replacing workers, quite frankly, with lower wage workers. So it’s not like the work’s gone away. They’re just paying us a lot less. Neoliberalism’s fangs have come out and started ripping us apart even deeper.

Darity (11:46):

So, the way I like to put it is “jobs may be disappearing, but work is not.” And that work needs to be done and we need to structure a way in which that work can be done with dignity, with adequate compensation and with an opportunity for people to develop their full range of skills. And I think that we can do that through a program that’s well-designed for a job assurance or a job guarantee.

Grumbine (12:13):

Well, look, I want to ask you a question because I live in an area and I actually have seen it all over the place, but in particular, my area, they have odd gym class times for the kids in school, like the third Wednesday of the month, they get to go to gym. The eighth Tuesday of the month, they get to take clarinet lessons and, you know, whatever. I mean, it’s just ridiculous.

And I think to myself, if we fully funded the arts the way they used to be, and we could actually have professionals go back into the schools teaching art class, and teaching music class, and teaching drama, and any other thing that fulfills that 360 view of what it means to be a human being. If we fulfill that 360, we would have massive amount of good paying jobs that would enrich our children as well.

So all of a sudden, the make-work concept, which it’s completely not what we’re talking about here, this make-work concept immediately goes out the door once you start actually putting the funds back into the programs, back into the public services that we have.

If you just did that, forget bringing back the twisting the ties on the Tootsie pop I’m talking about the real public service works. If we stopped cutting our nose off to spite our face, we have a ton of jobs, good paying jobs that are skilled positions, if you will.

Darity (13:32):

No, absolutely. I mean, I was thinking that, you know, the precedent for the type of program we have in mind is the Works Progress Administration during the great depression. The difference is that we have in mind a permanent program that’s universally applicable to all adult Americans. And the WPA, unfortunately, was temporary; it didn’t have to be but it was cut off around the time of World War II.

And it was not something that was made universally available to all workers. So this would be different on that score. But what was interesting about the WPA was the range of jobs that were offered under that program. And it included opportunities for individuals who were trained as historians to collect narratives from folks who had been enslaved, who were still living.

It included the opportunity for visual artists to paint some of the most impressive and important murals that were ever, ever created in the United States. It provided the opportunity for some creative writers to engage in their art form. And I think it would not be at all difficult or unimaginable to have those folks with those talents go into our schools, being funded through a federal job program, for the purposes of enriching our young people.

One of the things that’s happened in recent years in the United States is a presumption that the only thing we should really be teaching kids are the so called core subjects. And so as a result, we’ve diminished the importance that we attribute to social studies, which includes history, which from my perspective, is the most important field.

We’ve diminished their ability to participate in physical education programs, like you mentioned, in arts, in music and the like. And I think that a program like the federal job guarantee could provide an opportunity to reintroduce those into the schools.

But more generally, I think what could be an important, important contribution from a federal job guarantee is the provision of, what I guess I like to call, the provision of the human infrastructure or care work. This is an arena where I think, well, who knows, but I think we probably would prefer not to automate these jobs. So I’m thinking about elder care.

I’m thinking about childcare and the like. And I think it’s important that we begin to compensate the people who do do that type of work adequately. We provide them with additional training. We professionalize those positions and we could do that through the structure of a federal job guarantee.

Grumbine (16:15):

I love it. I absolutely love it. So let’s take a step back and look at, well, no, before, I want to go, I don’t want to leave this. I want to talk about automation for just a minute more. You and I were engaged in, in a lengthy, or we were on the same team, but we were engaged in quite a lengthy Twitter battle with some UBI folks, probably for about five, six, seven days it was going on. It might still be going on.

But, you know, the, the idea was is that they really, really put a stinker on the idea of paid work. And the idea here is, this is my understanding; this is me blending the words of Warren Mosler, Ellis Winningham, Joe Firestone and others. But the government created the dollar, which is in essence a tax credit.

Once they created the dollar or the tax credit, they created the first unemployed American citizens, so to speak, because now, all of a sudden, you got to have employment to pay the tax credit. So without having a dollar in your hand, there is no way to pay the tax.

But we know that if we just give dollars away without productive output, we ended up in an inflationary situation. That’s the basis for inflation. So when we talk about automation, I mean, Captain Kirk still shows up for work. Scotty and Spock still show up, Uhura, Sulu, they all show up for work.

Why do you suppose that the concept of a UBI, which has its foundations, quite frankly, in, I know that MLK spoke to it as a secondary option to a job guarantee, but he, but we also about it from the likes of the Chicago School of Milton Friedman and we see the Koch Brothers even pushing it with they’re American enterprises because they see it as a way of dismantling the social safety nets, which take me to another point.

And I’m wrapping this all up. I’ll give you a chance to respond. You know, the idea of throwing money at reparations or throwing money at the poor, you see wealthy people come out of poverty that get a million dollars. They don’t know what to do with and they end up destitute a year later. Money is not the only thing here that goes to making people whole.

It’s the services, it’s the structure. It is providing people necessary boundaries that help them survive. It’s not just throwing cash at it like a school voucher. We’re talking about we need, people really need structure and help. Many people were never given a shot at having quote unquote, “a whole healthy family,” whatever.

So they start out complete, they start out 10 steps behind not just the dollars behind, but all the other things that go along with that. Would you take a minute and just either tell me I’m right or wrong, or I just kind of fill in what your beliefs are on that.

Darity (18:57):

So I don’t want to fetishize employment or jobs.

Grumbine (19:02):

Sure.

Darity (19:02):

But I do want to say that there is this tradition. There’s a tradition on the left that I call kind of the zero-work philosophy, which is the idea that we place too much emphasis on people going to work and I’ll come back to that. But then there’s also the Koch Brothers’ position, which is to say, “Let’s make our system of social provision efficient.

So just let’s give people a lump sum of money and let’s eliminate all the other types of entitlement programs that we might have.” So that would not be horrible depending on the amount of the lump sum and what kinds of opportunities people had to deploy the money. One of the things that’s been very interesting that we’ve talked about a bit offline is the emergence of the so-called Modern Monetary Theory.

Grumbine (19:59):

Yes.

Darity (19:59):

And the Modern Monetary Theory, as I understand it, has it that public sector spending creates the finance to support it. That the tax capacity to cover the expenses that are associated with new public spending is a consequence of the new public spending itself. So the critical dimension of that is that there needs to be something that’s produced as a consequence of the new public spending to support the new finance, otherwise we will have a high inflation risk.

A federal job guarantee speaks to that in a very direct way, but it also speaks to the notion that for better or worse, I think people are still in a position where there is dignity and social interactions associated with the workplace and the work experience.

And those are things that cannot be provided by just giving people a lump sum of money. And to the extent that we still have a wide range of social needs that are not going to be met at the behest of the private sector, then it’s a situation where there’s a tremendous benefit to creating a new set of jobs that are public sector jobs, that are well paid, and that are a universal option or a public option for all Americans.

Grumbine (21:23):

Very good. All right. So I want to to ask you, we’re going to go to the next line of this, which is, third one is a federal job guarantee could build an inclusive economy. Talk to me about that.

Darity (21:36):

Well, it couldn’t do it alone. And in fact, I’ve tried to emphasize that when I think about the consequences of a federal job guarantee, that’s something that could help reduce income inequality, and it could eliminate working poverty, but it would do very little to address wealth inequality. So we would need to consider another set of policies if we wanted to tackle wealth inequality.

But it’s a terrific route towards more inclusion in the economy because the job guarantee would ensure that folks who are from social groups that are frequently excluded from employment, subjected to discrimination and the like, would always have the public option for employment.

So I’m thinking in particular of the problems that are faced by individuals who might have some type of disability. I’m thinking of the problems that are faced by our recently returning veterans who have a great deal of difficulty finding good employment.

I’m thinking about the problems that are faced by Black American workers who are subjected to an unemployment rate that is two times as high as the white unemployment rate at every level of education.

So there are groups that are excluded from full participation in quality work and quality opportunities in the workplace and that’s something that we could begin to address in a very comprehensive way via the creation of a federal job guarantee.

Grumbine (23:12):

Okay, so one of the things that I was considering when we were talking through this amongst ourselves was the fact that once you set the bar, and you already said this couple points ago, once you set the baseline, once you set the basement, if you will, for the private sector to compete. I love that by the way because that makes them have to step up.

You want to pick on me, come on and get me, but you’ve got to do this to get me because I’m perfectly content serving my community right now. But when you take that to the next step, one of the things that I think blends us together is is that, you know, we have a lot of cultural diversity.

And when we talk about diversity and we just sort of say it, we don’t really always take a step back and consider what that means. We all relate to things differently. We have a different history. We have different life experiences, our communities, even though we all eat, breathe and so forth, the same, we have a different experience. Our history is different.

You know, the perspective of which we consider victors and losers is different. Everything is different. And so when we wear our clothes differently because we have a certain historical factor that goes into the way our cultural biases are shaped, you know, that should not preclude us from working.

And so here we have an opportunity, I think to myself of let’s say, high, high density, Hispanic populations, high density, African American populations that have their own unique culture within the United States. Neoliberalism has decimated cultures and languages around the world.

I believe the federal job guarantee would enable us to have cultural diversity in America in a meaningful way. What are your thoughts on that? I know that’s not one of the points, but I just wanted to see if you feel the same or if I’m oversimplifying it.

Darity (25:04):

Well, I think it’s all contingent on making sure that if we were to introduce a federal job guarantee, we’d have to do it properly. I mean, I can think of, I can think of some schemes for introducing a federal job guarantee that would not accomplish many of the things that the folks on my team have in mind.

So it would have to be of the type where there was a real emphasis on developing jobs that were associated with the kinds of artistic, cultural, and historical practices that we want to maintain a high variety of. And so, yeah, I think we could do that but we have to make sure that we design the program in such a way that we really accomplish that in.

I’d also like to add something else, which is the phenomenon of exclusion from work or confinement to a particular set of jobs is not specific to low income and poorly educated Americans, depending upon which social group they’re from. There’s this really, really disturbing study that was done by Michael Gaddis recently, where he crafted applications for jobs based upon advertised positions with a set of individuals who don’t really exist.

He assigned to the letters black sounding names and white sounding names, but he went a step further. He paired a set of institutions, private institutions and public institutions, good public institutions but public institutions that don’t have the same cache as the private institutions that they were linked with. And so he paired Harvard University with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

He paired Duke University with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and he paired Stanford University with the University of California at Riverside. And he assigned the public institutions to all of the letters with the white sounding names. And he assigned the private institutions to all the letters with the black sounding names; and the white sounding name letters got significantly more callbacks for job interviews than the black sounding ones.

And so it’s not just a question of folks who are at the lower end of the educational spectrum being subjected to discrimination. Discrimination operates at all, at all tiers but if we can push the bottom up significantly, it may have a beneficial effect along all the rungs of the labor market.

Intermission (27:56):

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Grumbine (28:45):

You know, it’s interesting you say that. I was talking to a IT guy not too long ago. He said, “Why don’t we, instead of using our real names and resumes, why don’t we just use some sort of a, you know, this is the job title we’re going through, and assign a number to it and put the credentials and so forth below so that we can’t have any of those biases going in?” I mean, obviously once you get to the interview . . .

Darity (29:12):

Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. You can get to the interview stage but once you get there.

Grumbine (29:16):

You’re clearing some hurdles, but the idea was that obviously you do prevent at least . . . you get, like, okay, so let’s, I’m going to be silly. Let’s say somebody’s name was Goober, Goober Stanley or something like that, and they just got a kick out of it.

And they had no idea whether this guy was good or not, and he walks in the door, and the guy is just a rock star, man. He just blows up the place, but they would have never gotten them in the front door because the name was Goober. I mean, I’m just using that as an example.

Darity (29:45):

Well, you know, we actually do have a situation, particularly among some Asian American job applicants where they actually try to mask their Asian identity. And they do that in part by changing, changing the name or they might even legally change their name. And so, yeah, but my feeling is that’s so fundamentally wrong that people have to do that, that we need to change the conditions that they’re confronted with.

Grumbine (30:15):

Yeah. I completely agree. So, you know what, you bring me to the next one and I want to circle back to that when we’re done with the five to finish off because I think the social component of all this stuff is very difficult to legislate but yet at the same time, there’s got to be some answers. But let’s finish off the five here. And you said number four was federal jobs could provide socially useful goods and services. I think we touched on that a little bit, but go ahead and…

Darity (30:44):

Well, I mean, again, this goes back to this notion that we could use the structure of this program to address our public goods needs. And by public goods I mean those goods that are socially useful, but are unlikely to be provided in sufficient amounts by the private sector, because it’s not necessarily something that they would perceive as profitable to do.

And you know, historically, that’s included the physical infrastructure of the society, the building of roads, bridges, and highways and the like. So I’m thinking that what we need to do is extend that kind of commitment to working on the physical infrastructure to our human infrastructure.

And to address needs like the services that should be provided within our schools, that the needs that we have for an aging population to receive quality care, as well as for young children, particularly to the extent that we can have quality daycare services. Then it makes it possible for parents to explore other kinds of work options themselves in a way that they couldn’t if they have to look after the kids on a 24 hour basis.

Grumbine (31:56):

Fantastic. So let’s go the last one of this right here and it is to stabilize the economy and that right there, I’ll give my version of this and I’ll let you reply back. From an MMT perspective, the thing that I love about the federal job guarantee stabilizing the economy is that what it in effect does is create the labor standard, not the gold standard, not the whatever standard, the labor standard.

So now, no matter what happens to the economy, because our federal government is the currency issuer, we have an automatic stabilizer of people that are employed. We call it a buffer stock of employed people. And this allows for people to roll on and off the job guarantee at will. They can take a private sector job. They don’t like it, they can come back to the job guarantee.

But what it does is, in effect, it always keeps the economy at a very, very smooth level. It takes away the threat of destitution. And I can tell you right now, personal anecdote, when the global financial crisis hit, I lost a 17 year career at Verizon. I had moved up the food chain high enough that I had developed a high middle class lifestyle that I had grown to like.

I had a lot of children, so it wasn’t quite fluffy, but it was better than average for sure. And all of a sudden, I got my second master’s degree and the crisis hit and they took volunteers to take a buyout. Well, dumb me thought that this is the perfect time. I just got my second master. It’s gonna be the perfect time to take a buyout, right? Wrong answer. It took 18 months. I lost everything.

I got to keep my home. I lost my family. I lost my job . . . I . . . just complete and utter destitution. And the reason why I say this is because a lot of people don’t have that to fall from, but it’s a brutal fall when you’ve had it and then you fall flat on your face. It’s not just like a minor curb fall, you’re falling off the top of a building.

Darity (34:03):

I’m really grateful for your candor because one of the things that I learned during the course of the great recession is that there is a large number of individuals who had professional level jobs, relatively well paid jobs, who lost them; and they would not tell you that.

And it seemed to be the case that they had internalized this notion that they were responsible for losing the job at a time where there was mass unemployment. And it’s so strange how we have captured people’s minds to make them think that situations in which they are forced out of jobs are attributable to some kind of deficiency that they themselves possess.

So I appreciate you talking about that because it’s very unusual for somebody who had the type of job you had to say, “I lost it and it was hell, but, okay.” So that’s another reason for a federal job guarantee. It’s not just something that would be an option for people at the lower end of the labor force, but it would provide some measure of security for folks who lose better paid jobs.

Especially since one of the dimensions of the program that we have in mind is that you would have benefits, including the same type of health insurance that’s provided to a federal employees and elected officials right now. So even if the salary differential might be quite significant, you at least would have the capacity to maintain health insurance for your family and for yourself.

Grumbine (35:41):

I want to point to this because there’s a statistic that says 45,000 people annually commit suicide from joblessness.

Darity (35:48):

Yes.

Grumbine (35:49):

And just so we’re all full aware I’ve told my story so many times it doesn’t bother me anymore to tell it. I am an open book because I feel that’s the way we heal. But I mean, I want people to understand that it’s not just some academic exercise. I am a man who sized up the rafters in my basement, thinking about jumping off a bridge, wanting not to deal with the pain that I was dealing with.

How could I have taken on $127,000 worth a student loans, and I can’t find work. What’s wrong with me and why would my family leave? Why would this happen? Why would that happen? And so the reason why I bring this up is that people that are jobless, when you look, you said, African Americans in particular are twice as unemployed as white Americans in the same education bracket, you name it, whatever the thing is, it’s double.

And so when you think about that and you look at crime and you look at the pain and suffering of vulnerable communities in particular, I can tell you minus the melanin issue, I genuinely wanted to die. And so I can only imagine, and you know, there’s alternative economies that are illegal, unfortunately, to survive and people turn to that to survive.

And it’s a self-perpetuating cycle, the flush down the toilet. And these people deserve better and it breaks, I mean, I fan up, man. It’s just really, it gets me going because I, that’s what made me wake up, Sandy. That was what made me wake up. I was a Republican back in the day and I had to take the Nestea plunge off the top, you know, and I was already on my move away, but it was MMT that taught me the economic message that changed everything.

Once you understand what we’re talking about tonight, it kind of disabuses many of the myths that keep us divided and turn us into a real 99%; and that we can really fight for humanity versus balkanizing each other based on differentiating criteria that allows us to become one and become a community again. I just wanted to share that with you so you knew that this is a heartfelt thing here.

Darity (37:54):

Thank you.

Grumbine (37:55):

You got it. So can you talk a little bit about the impacts of the African American community? I don’t, obviously I’m not, I’m not equipped to speak on that. I talked to African Americans about the job guarantee and I talked to them about, “Hey listen.

This is stuff that you guys can take and craft to your liking. This is something that if we buy this, paid for it nationally and administer it locally that your local communities where you guys want to change the rules and make them suit the way your community needs them.

Here’s an opportunity to really, really put your stamp on it and really lift all ships in your community.” What is it about this that really, really should speak? If I were, as a white man, if I were an African American, what would you say to me to make me interested in the federal job guarantee?

Darity (38:45):

Well, this may be a little abstract, but it’s a universal program. And so the premise is that everybody would have the option of seeking public sector employment at any moment that they felt the need for that type of job opportunity. And so this would be beneficial to anyone in our society, regardless of whether or not they’re melanin deprived or not.

Grumbine (39:17):

I like that.

Darity (39:17):

Yeah. I mean, the universality of the program is precisely one of the reasons why it’s so attractive from my perspective, even though the odds of being subjected to unemployment and joblessness are higher for Black Americans, they’re not zero for non-Black Americans. And in moments like the great recession, we have mass unemployment that affects all segments of the population.

It disproportionately hurt Black Americans more but the magnitude of the trauma was quite extensive across all Americans. And I always thought that, you know, the very first thing Barack Obama should have done as the new president of the United States was developed a massive employment program in the face of the great recession.

And that was not his priority. It’s not what he tried to do first. And it might’ve been possible at that point because in the first two years of his first term, his party had control of both houses in Congress.

Grumbine (40:23):

Let me ask you another question. And this is something that I’m kind of treading into new territory a little bit. I have gone out on a limb and said that I believe that while this isn’t the cure all, it’s not the silver bullet panacea here, I do believe that it is a strong enough program, depending upon how it’s designed, caveat right there, I do you believe it’s a strong enough program that it ends a lot of xenophobia as well.

And what it does is it allows us, once we understand how federal financing actually works, we don’t have to be as worried about our open borders or closed borders or finding work because, all of a sudden, we perpetuate a productive, inclusive economy, and people are no longer fighting with each other for these scarce things.

They all have the ability to serve the community. And so now we’re no longer dealing with this scarcity that creates at least a certain layer of veneer of hate. I know there’s another layer of hate beyond that that is more ingrained and so forth, but there’s another layer that is, “Hey, I’m competing with you for the scarce thing. Who’s in my way?”

And, you know, and then when people compete with that, all of a sudden it’s like those Mexicans coming to the United States are taking my job. Yeah, right. And so what I’m trying to understand is do you think the federal job guarantee, if we orchestrated correctly, could in fact solve a large portion of the xenophobic behavior that Americans experience?

Darity (42:01):

Well, I, I don’t want to overstate what it could do. I think that part of my commitment to this as a universal program is because, is because of that xenophobic sentiment. That if you introduce a program that’s beneficial to everyone, you’re less likely to have the kind of resistance that might be associated with a program that’s for specific or particular groups.

Although I am an advocate of reparations, I recognize that that’s going to be a harder, a harder case to make. So I’m not sure if this type of initiative would significantly reduce the level of intergroup animosity that exists in the United States or the degree of anti-immigrant sentiment or the degree of anti-black sentiment. I’m just not sure, but I presume it would not hurt.

Grumbine (42:52):

So one of the things, we started this Real Progressives animal that it’s become before Bernie Sanders started running because we were following Stephanie Kelton. We were chasing Stephanie wherever she went. And when she went to join Bernie Sanders campaign, we followed her there as well because we were MMT Progressives. That was kind of what our driver was.

And we would listen to the way the media went out there and talked about Bernie Sanders and African Americans in particular would come up . . . I don’t know whether this was a general feeling below the surface or whether this was just what was elevated by the mainstream media.

It was a consensus belief, or at least kept coming out, that Bernie Sanders wasn’t inclusive, wasn’t representing African-Americans, that he was always trying to throw this economic salvation at everybody and that wasn’t really what it took.

But then you had folks like Killer Mike, and you had others you know, like Nina Turner and so forth that came forth with a lot of passion and a lot of dedication, Danny Glover and others that spoke out to, you know, be a part of this.

What is it about the economic narrative that is missing that that is not resonating? Or is this just blown out of proportion? What is that? There’s, there’s a gap there and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Darity (44:15):

My impression was that some of the reaction that you’re describing was attributable to Sanders initial failure to address police violence against Black Americans. I’m not so sure it was his economic message. I think it was the sense that there’s been a persistent crisis of lynching violence in the United States, and the lynching activities are now actually conducted by our police in our major cities, also in smaller communities as well.

And I think that there was some sentiment that this was something that he was not addressing or talking about. And I think that that was the source of the initial negative reaction on the part of some Black American observers to the Sanders campaign.

I think also, for me, there was a sense that, at that point, we were already talking about a federal job guarantee. We were talking about a proposal that we call the Baby Bonds Proposal, which is the provision of a trust fund for every newborn infant.

We were talking about reparations. We were talking about bold policies and, you know, despite Stephanie Kelton’s best efforts, I don’t think that the Sanders campaign actually really adopted truly bold policies. From my perspective then, that was a flaw also, but I’d be hard pressed to be a Hillary Clinton enthusiast. She’s hardly the worst.

Grumbine (45:51):

Ta-Nehisi Coates came out and said some great things. He said, “Hey, listen. I’m busting Bernie Sanders chops because Bernie Sanders actually is closer to getting this. He’s the only one that’s running that I think we’ll actually get this, I’m busting his chops because he’s going to get it. Whereas why would I even bother talking about Hillary? She’s still stuck in super predator mode.”

 And I stepped back and I said, you know what? I relate to this because I spend my time, maybe this is bad, but I spend my time critiquing my own, critiquing the Progressives, critiquing my side of the street, because what good does it do for me to point across the street over there when my own team can’t get its act together.

And when I see our own willing to just sit there and yell and scream about inactionable things and get focused and caught up in nonsense instead of really building the momentum so that when there is an opportunity to enact a broad sweeping second bill of rights, new deal, lifesaving environmental changes, you name it. We’re still busy talking about Cheetolini and we’ve missed the tie.

We’ve missed the opportunity and they get very angry at me. They get very, very angry at me. But I’m telling you if I can’t rely on our progressive movement, you certainly don’t expect me to rely on Republicans, do you? I don’t, I don’t know how to pull this off, Sandy.

Darity (47:26):

Self-criticism is vital for us all in terms of trying to move forward, to have, I mean, the program that I’m talking to you about tonight is one that we’ve developed over a period of time and have, we’ve been challenged on a lot of dimensions of this.

And we’ve had to think about ways in which the program should be modified from what we originally were talking about. So self-criticism as well as criticism from folks who are outside of your circle is always valuable as long as it’s well intentioned. And so, yeah, you got to talk about what’s wrong or what’s right.

Grumbine (48:04):

So I want to, I want to close this up. I want to ask you, first of all, I’d love for you to come back again and if you can help me hook up with Darrick and the others, man, I really want to create a full 360 perspective so everybody understands that this is an inclusive push.

And the perspective you brought tonight is just so refreshing. It’s like, it’s a very different spin, even though it’s exactly the same, if you will. And it’s beautiful and this is exactly what folks need to hear. So what I want to ask you is, obviously, you have been working on this. What are some of the things that you’re working on in the background now? What are some of the next steps for you, Sandy?

Darity (48:46):

So, I’m interested in fuller development of the Baby Bonds Proposal. Again, this is the idea of providing a trust fund for every child. Rich folks give their kids trust funds, why shouldn’t every child have a trust fund? And so I’m working on that. I’m also working, you know, with our team on the notion of developing a full scale public banking system.

Same fundamental premise is that we should have public sector institutions that compete with the private sector for the provision of banking services. People are concerned frequently about the expenses and fees that the banking system places on credit cards and other kinds of credit arrangements. And I think the way you get that to go down is by offering those same services without those fees.

So that’s another thing that were thinking about very carefully. And then this may seem odd, but we’ve been concerned about the destruction of the postal system, the defunding of the postal system, the increasing reliance upon forced privatization of the postal system. And so we think that maybe the job guarantee would provide us with an opportunity to repopulate the staffs of our postal services and rejuvenate the postal service.

Grumbine (50:04):

That’s fantastic. Okay, so I’m looking forward to hearing more about each of these in the future. So Dr. Darity, thank you so much for joining me tonight. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble. This was just wonderful. I’m ecstatic.

Darity (50:18):

Thank you and I would love to come back.

Grumbine (50:21):

Thank you so much.

Darity (50:22):

Bye bye.

Grumbine (50:22):

All right, bye bye.

Ending Credits (50:29):

Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.