UMass Amherst professor and PERI Co-Director Robert Pollin discuss his latest book that he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, about the Global Green New Deal and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in addressing the climate crisis. Hosted by Rob Johnson on his podcast Economics and Beyond. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/podcasts

Transcript:

Rob Johnson:

I’m here today with Bob Pollin from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and the co founder and co director of the Political Economy Research Institute, PERI. We’re here to talk about anything he wants to talk about, but particularly his brilliant work related to climate in his recent co authored book with Noam Chomsky, and how this new administration in this world is going to embrace the challenges that they frame in their writing. Bob, thanks for joining me today.

Robert Pollin:

Great being on. Thank you, Rob.

Rob Johnson:

So right now, we’re in this turmoil. The notion in March of last year was that the pandemic was a surprise, a transient surprise, it seems to be much more resilient. We’ve gone through a presidential election, we have a new administration, and this ominous specter of climate change and how would I say, the displacement of just about everything, including life on earth stands out on the horizon. What do you see? What gives you heartburn? What are you cheering for? What do you wish you were seeing in this context?

Robert Pollin:

That’s a lot, but right, since the pandemic hit basically, in mid March, we can look at the standard statistics on employment that I find more illuminating. Just look at the number of people that have applied for unemployment insurance, since March to now, I just actually calculated it last night. It’s 47% of the labor force. Meaning sometime between last March and now, roughly half of the people that work in the United States have become unemployed. So in terms of the severity of the downturn, it’s equivalent, or not more so than the 1930s. We’ve got to get out of it. Sure, when people get inoculated, hopefully we’ll be able to reopen.

But we do need the booster, because people have been left behind, businesses have failed. State and local governments are broke. And in March, we passed the first stimulus program that was 10% of GDP, the CARES Program. We need more. In December, they passed the COVID-19, that was 900 billion, about 4% of GDP. And now, Biden is talking about another 1.9% of GDP about 9%, all of that is needed in order to just lift the economy back off. Otherwise, we’re going to be stuck in a very, very slow halting recovery. That’s short term. In terms of a sustainable growth path to return to, obviously, we have to deal with climate change in a dramatic way, that has not happened.

The proposal that Biden had when he was the candidate, Build Back Better, was reasonably good. There were things about it that I thought were okay. The number one thing that I thought was okay, was the scale of spending. He’s proposing 2 trillion over four years, which is more or less in line with what I think is a reasonable number. The other parts that I thought were okay, was that he does give attention to the quality of job creation, not only numbers of jobs, the quality of jobs. And he does talk about the transition for workers and communities i...