"18 Millions Jobs," The Nation, and the Role of the Media

“...The unemployment rate will stand at around 4 percent when Obama runs for re-election in 2012.” This seeming pipe dream can actually happen, writes economist Robert Pollin in a recent issue of The Nation. Pollin arguesthat by propping up demand through fiscal aid to states, releasing bank reserves and channeling them toward business investment, and boosting the supply side by spending on infrastructure, Congress can create 500,000 jobs every month for the next two-and-a-half years, bringing the economy back to full employment just in time for the next presidential election. The proposal is far from perfect—in particular, Pollin seems far too sanguine about the possibility of inflation—but the piece is worth reading. Pollin lays out a coherent alternative to the pessimism that dominates discussions of the US labor market. More cautious publications would not print such a radical proposal, perhaps out of (well-grounded) fear that the idea might turn out to be catastrophically wrong. And that’s why media outlets outside the country’s political center are so important.

Their articles can sometimes be shrill and intemperate—and also bold and visionary. Because they need not hew the line of the governing parties, they permanently enjoy the freedom of the opposition. This is the freedom to safely propose ideas too transformative to penetrate the cocoons of those who must concern themselves with the day-to-day stresses of governing. Dissident publications become laboratories for concepts that might one day fundamentally change the way policymakers view American life.

Without the writings of another unorthodox economist and Nation contributor, John Kenneth Galbraith, our fixation with growth at the expense of other measures of social welfare might have pre-empted Medicare, Medicaid and other achievements of the Great Society era. Today, our society is kept affluent—even in times of recession—in large part due to the stabilizing effects of these programs. It would be foolish if the media outlets that voice “conventional wisdom”—a term coined by Galbraith himself—kept us from considering what the mainstream perpetually deems unattainable.

ALEX JONES