A Job Guarantee will transform the way we think about money – which allows us to focus on climate change

New York City’s water works money shows that, in the case of money and public debt, ideas about money shape possibilities for public action: Had policymakers attempted to borrow or tax before starting construction, work on the steam pump might never have begun. And had the New York State Assembly been able to create money to address the water issue after the war, they might have repeated the engineering feat. Instead, they chartered a corporate bank that had other priorities. Because of the way New York City and later the State Assembly institutionalized money creation, people’s knowledge of money and debt changed. While public water works currency did not drown out the end, corporate cash functioned according to the logic of a for-profit institution. Money, then, is an example of “the elaborate imaginative construct that is human society. […] because it is a mental construct, how we think about it changes how it works” (Atwood : 203). Money has no inherent logic it imposes on societies, and there is no reason this large-scale mechanism for coordinating activities has to be opaque from the perspective of the population at large.

What would be today’s equivalent of water works money—the practice of using money for a public purpose, and intelligibly so? An increasingly popular policy proposal, the federal Job Guarantee (e.g., Tcherneva , ; Ehnts and Höfgen ), at first glance appears as just another social policy, but it could lead to a profound rethinking of money and society. The Job Guarantee would guarantee a publicly funded job to anyone willing and able to work. It would end involuntary unemployment, and provide jobs tailored to people’s already-existing skills, allowing them to serve their communities. But the Job Guarantee is more than a promising social policy: it has the potential to transform our current understanding of money. If we begin to understand that governmental bodies can create money to coordinate the activities of people in communities, we can reconnect with money’s character as a means. Collectively, we no longer think like Simmel’s “foolish parents” who only ask what something costs. We can, instead, value the contributions and skills of real, living individuals on our own terms, and organize their contributions for tasks small and large, from municipal water provisioning to addressing the myriad emergencies of climate change.