Challenging a paradigm

In my travels today, I have hour-to-hour commitments (sort of like wall-to-wall) and so I have called in our guest blogger, Victor Quirk to provide some further fuel for debate in my absence. I will be back in my office on Monday although the Saturday quiz will appear tomorrow sometime. So today Victor is talking about how we go about challenging a paradigm from his perspective as a political sociologist. Over to him.

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Advocating full employment

Today I am travelling all day and have no time to write anything. So I asked our guest blogger Victor Quirk who has just completed a PhD on the political constraints to full employment to fill the gap. As usual, he more than fills it. In this blog he shares some of his doctoral research which I had the pleasure of being the supervisor. The depth of documentary enquiry that Victor engaged in was something else. And the final product was an incisive and very challenging critique of the mainstream orthodoxy that erects artificial barriers to the achievement of human potential (in the form of unemployment) to advance its ideology urgency which ultimately is about extracting an ever greater share of real national income. I will be back tomorrow.

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Job Guarantees and social democracy

Today is my last day in London and I am tied up all day with meetings and activities and then later I am travelling back to Australia. So I invoked the guest blogger facility and asked Victor Quirk to share his views on employment guarantees. Victor has just finished a doctoral dissertation and has produced one of the most compelling research efforts I have had the pleasure to supervise. He chose a very challenging topic overall – the political constraints on full employment – and compiled a very rich argument based on a substantial interrogation of an extensive array of primary documents which he sourced from various national archives in Australia, Britain and the US. Now that Victor has finished his work I hope he will share more of it as a guest blogger. So … over to Victor.

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A light on the hill the Labor Party prefers to leave off

Today’s guest blog, while I am away, is from Victor Quirk who has been tracing some early modern monetary resonances (from the 1930s). He argues that this month (September) marks the 90th anniversary of one of the proudest episodes in the history of the Australian Labor Party (the current Federal government), but one that, he ventures, will not be acknowledged by the present owners of the ALP franchise. It involved the first serious attempt by an Australian Government to establish full employment, the celebration of which would only serve to highlight the distance to which the ALP has moved from serving the interests of working people. I will be back writing tomorrow.

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Why don’t mainstream economists get modern money if it is right?

Today, I am in Sydney giving a talk at the ACTU Jobs Summit and pretty short of time. I was also motivated by the Temporary Leader of the Opposition who announced on his Twitter site yesterday that his dog, Mellie had just updated her Blog. Yes Malcolm’s dogs blog keeps us up to date with all their goings on including watching the Tour de France. So if he can do it so can I except I don’t like pets. So I thought I would introduce a Guest Blogger spot so that whenever someone I know, who doesn’t want to create their own infrastructure has something interesting to say, they will be able to say it. So today’s guest blogger is Victor Quirk. This is what he has to say. I’ll be back tomorrow.

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