Tackling the Global Unemployment Crisis in the Interests of Peace

Widespread unemployment, especially among young men, creates conditions that are ripe for social unrest, radicalization, and crime. This was the case in Europe and Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, and is the case in the Middle East and elsewhere now. How can the U.S. government and private sector investors accelerate economic development in countries with high unemployment and rising violence?

Participants include:
Robert Johnson - President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking
Robert Hormats - Former Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy & the Environment
Pavlina Tcherneva - Associate Professor & Chair of the Department of Economics at Bard College
Daniel Alpert - Founding Managing Partner of Westwood Capital, LLC
David Bank - CEO & Editor of ImpactAlpha

About this series: Should we fundamentally reorient how America relates to the rest of the world in an era when most of our biggest challenges are global in nature and planetary in scale? The Reinvent Foreign Policy Series will ask the questions that frequently don’t get asked among American policymakers and try to propose new kinds of solutions. It will begin with no preconceptions, except that America has made a lot of costly mistakes and needs to learn how to do better.

About Reinvent: Reinvent gathers top innovators in video conversations to fundamentally reinvent our world.

[Tivvv]

"Widespread unemployment, especially among young men, creates conditions that are ripe for social unrest, radicalization, and crime."

It's not unemployment that is the problem, it's the lack of income for people without a job. Today, anyone who has the money, can work something that adds something to the experience of others. It's a lack of certainty that others will pay money for that, and often an outright lack of money in the pockets of fellow people, so they couldn't pay even if they wanted, that make the world of work quite tricky to navigate.

An unconditional income could be the foundation for people to become active from, and if it adequately improves aggregate demand, it'd also help with creating the additional earned incomes that people might want to obtain with their increasingly unique contributions, as robots thankfully take care of all work that is routine or predictable in some feature.