Prehistory of an Idea

      People Must Live by Work discusses the history of an idea, one that seems completely alien to Americans today: that the government should fight unemployment (especially, but not only, in massive global depressions) by hiring the unemployed directly. The policymakers who invented and elaborated on this idea believed that the government had both a moral mandate and the practical capacity to obliterate unemployment altogether. It could deploy direct job creation measures to fine-tune the unemployment rate and eradicate mass joblessness, even in periods as calamitous as the Great Depression.

      The concept was not merely theoretical. For ten years (1933–1943), direct job creation was put into practice on a national scale by the federal government, which became the largest single employer in the country. After World War II (during which millions of Americans worked for the federal government either in uniform or in factories), a furious debate ensued over whether the right to a job should be enshrined in law and whether direct job creation should be used to give it life. Arguments persisted for thirty years, culminating in a clash over a 1978 bill meant to abolish unemployment forever. Thereafter, there was silence,