'We know how to get out of this mess'

We have a lot of work to be done, just waiting for people to do it.

We have a lot of people without work to do.

This really isn’t complicated.

Here’s Dean Baker this morning for the Center for Economic Policy and Research:

We know how to get out of this mess, we have known how for 70 years. We just need the government to generate demand. That means spending money. Ideally it would spend money on useful things like education, health care, and infrastructure, but even if it spent money in wasteful ways it would still create jobs and put people to work.

In the ’30s we got much of the way back to full employment with the Works Progress Administration and other programs. Much of what was done was useful — look around, you won’t have to go far to find infrastructure built by Depression-era programs. However, it took the massive spending associated with World War II to get the economy back to full employment. There is no magic associated with war that makes military spending more effective in creating jobs. The only difference was that the threat to the nation from the Axis powers removed the political obstacles to the necessary spending.

The same situation applies today. We just need to spend money. That applies to both the United States and the euro zone countries. The problem is that we have more people in political leadership positions who want to be morality cops and lecture about balancing budgets rather than focus on policies that will restore economic growth.

Via Atrios, who quoted the very same chunk of text from Baker. In this case, repetition is good. And sadly necessary.

The current situation of low demand/high unemployment is quite literally a text-book problem. It is a problem with a clear, effective technical solution. This is stuff, as Baker says, that we know how to fix.

One thing that has always amazed me about the Dark Ages was how we managed to stop knowing so much of what we had previously known about, for example, sanitation.

One of the nice things about the Roman Empire was the way it didn’t require one to walk around ankle-deep in human excrement. Much of the former Roman Empire later opted to revert to having feces in the streets. I can’t believe that was a matter of preference. I don’t think people in Rome were muttering, “I wish the Empire would just fall already so we can get rid of this wretched sanitation and go back to raw sewage in the gutters.”

And yet that happened.

Europe knew how to solve the problem of sanitation and then, fairly suddenly, it stopped knowing how to solve that problem. And it took more than a thousand years of filth, stench and disease before they would figure it out again.

We seem to be doing the same thing right now. We’re ankle-deep in a mess we know how to fix, but we’ve chosen instead to pretend we don’t know how to fix it. That stinks.