This is a discussion group about the current global economic situation. It is sponsored by Friends Beyond Borders and the World Mind Network. As a touchstone for fresh thinking, we are using the work of Nobel Economics Laureate Edmund Phelps, author of the book 'Rewarding Work'. Professor Phelps has kindly provided us with this summation of his latest thought (March 2009) on the topic:

"My 1997 book REWARDING WORK (reissued with a new preface in 2007) was not the first time that low-wage subsidies were proposed. In fact, the Earned Income Tax Credit, enacted by the U.S. Congress in the 1980s, is a tax credit paid yearly to eligible person with a low wage income in the previous tax year. But it is aimed at low-income mothers of dependent children and has been extended to other women and to men only nominally. It is best thought of as a child-raising subsidy that matches what the mother is willing to earn in taxable income. My proposal is democratic in paying to attention to gender or parental status or even non-wage income. It is all about the importance of a person's work during his or her working-age years - the social importance and the importance to oneself.

The book gave a mix of lofty reasons and darker considerations. A career of employment in the business sector, particularly work in an enterprising economy with its endemic novelty and contest, is the only way that most people can experience sustained mental stimulation and intellectual challenge, which lead to job satisfaction and to personal growth. So why doesn't everyone get a job? Many low wage people like their jobs well enough but they chronically quit because the pay is insufficient to be able to sustain the sacrifice for very long. Some others never seek jobs to begin with for the same reason. Or they don't know what they would be missing. Young people especially, not having been there yet, do not know, as someone wrote, "how difficult a career is and how interesting." There are also social benefits from a person's employment. A parent's being engaged in one's job and involved in society's workplace may be crucial to the development of the parent's children and even to neighbors' children. Society does not want children to grow up isolated from business and denied any sense of what the experience is all about. Finally, society's members can move about with greater security (so they can get to work and bring home the bacon) and their own lives will be safer (so they can enjoy longer spans working and growing) if there is no element in the population that is employed in crime and goes in and out of prison because it is not rooted in what is society's central activity -- business. Why then does the Congress not enact such subsidies? Wouldn't people gladly see their taxes go up go up some 5 per cent to ensure that pay rates among the working poor are pulled up from a third to a half and ditto; and their unemployment is pulled down accordingly? Maybe not. And if I estimate that the Gross Domestic Product will be 5 per cent higher thanks to such a gain in the social health of the country -- enough to make the costs of the program self-financing - Congress may not believe it; or it may believe that the public will not believe it. But, off and on, I continue to try."

In the United States, the goals of Dr. Phelps' ambitious program have in some ways been attempted through the 787 billion dollar stimulus program recently enacted.

Some areas we want to explore: Would such a program work in other countries? How will Obama's efforts to "create or save 4 million jobs" affect labor in the rest of the world? How does the current worldwide lack of easy credit affect the Developing World? What reforms will be required in Europe, Japan, China, India, Africa?