This is a model of the U.S economy as a complicated figure-8 inextricably linking the public sector and private sector into a whole. Designed in 1934 by Lewis Baxter of Economic Security Analysts for Harry Hopkins’ brain trust at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, this was an early powerpoint – the black boxes are holes that allowed you to move a spreadsheet of numbers up and down simulating changes in Federal spending, showing you different values for various economic variables as you went.
Baxter’s conclusion was that the Federal government could essentially decide what unemployment rate the U.S would have, and could hit 0% if it committed to “universal useful employment based on assured jobs in public service to all potential producers otherwise unemployed,” because “government activities constitute, in effect, an auxiliary industry, might might always utilize advantageously the entire current labor surplus; and that such “industry” differs from the others only with reference to the nature of its “products” and the method of marketing them.”
As long as you did that, the only difference between the Federal government spending $4 billion ($70 billion in 2014) and spending $34 billion ($593 billion in 2014) was that “the average producer is buyieng less individually and more co-operatively.”
This is the most sweepingly radical document the U.S government has ever produced, and it was written in 1934 at a time when the Federal government was tiny, ludicrously weak in its capacity to change the lives of the ordinary citizen. And yet this document is so ambitious, so confident and optimistic of the ability of a democracy to master economic forces, that it makes everything that’s come since seem conservative by comparison.
This is how Americans used to dream.
Let’s make t-shirts.
Actually first things first but take a version of this that we can use as a Facebook meme
I’ll give it a try, but fair warning it’s a photocopy to begin with, so there’s a limit to how good we can make it.
as long as the text is readable it can be remade – the figures themselves seem fairly simple
I’m sure it is, I just have no skills at all in graphic design or photoshop or the like.
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