There are MMT and non-MMT versions.

The term Job Guarantee to describe public employment creation initiatives goes back a long way and was not ‘invented’ by me nor a blog commentator on Warren’s WWW site.

The resurrection and inclusion of the term in the MMT literature does indeed relate to my work.

When we started to develop what has become known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) around 1994 and 1995, my US MMT colleagues (Warren, Randy, Stephanie etc) used the term Employer of Last Resort (ELR) whereas I originally called the concept – which I developed in my Honours year at University (1978) – the Buffer Stock Employment (BSE) framework. The BSE terminology followed directly from the concept of buffer stocks of employment being used to stabilise the price and exhaust the quantity supplied (that is, create full employment).

Early on in MMT history, the two terms were interchangeable. I used BSE, the US colleagues used ELR.

Two things happened. First, I objected to the use of the term ELR because it was derived from the central bank’s capacity as Lender of Last Resort and I considered applying a term that was about the provision of inanimate reserves to human labour was not appropriate.

Second, Britain experienced the outbreak of mad cow disease (Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE) in 1996, which rendered my BSE acronym somewhat dubious.

There was some usage (by Randy for example) of the term Public Employment policy, but I decided to use replace the BSE terminology with the Job Guarantee terminology and I started using that language in public presentations and academic papers from then on.

After a while, we (the original MMT team) all agreed either formally or implicitly to unify the terminology as so it became Job Guarantee – late 1990s. The Americans still occasionally lapse back into ELR but rarely these days.