In the wake of the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, the Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. On this Thanksgiving Day, Alice O'Connor reminds us that a job is not just the means to economic security, but to psychological and social security as well.

In 1940 Yale Professor of Economics and Director of Unemployment Studies E. Wight Bakke published a pair of volumes titled The Unemployed Worker and Citizens Without Work, reporting the results of a remarkable eight-year study of unemployed workers and their families in Depression era New Haven. Seventy years later, the study's analysis still resonates, and never more so than in light of this month's unemployment figures showing jobless rates in the double digits, where they are expected to stay for the next couple of years.

Bakke's study was based on a premise that would be greeted as anathema in most economics departments today: that understanding unemployment would require looking beyond what could be revealed in statistics and household survey data. It would require an exploration of the social and psychological as well as the economic meaning of work. It would also require spending real time in the working-class communities most affected by job loss. And it would require asking workers and their families what they thought, how they felt, and how they were coping, emotionally and materially, with what Bakke memorably called "the task of making a living without a job." Accordingly, Bakke and his field researchers joined the ranks of New Haven's unemployed workers from 1932-39, acting as interviewers and observers and social surveyors while the realities of mass and long-term unemployment hit home. New Haven's unemployed, Bakke learned, felt robbed of their livelihoods but also of their self-respect, their place in the community, their sense of having a future, and, for the men in particular, their authority as breadwinners in the family. Not all of these losses were entirely bad -- Bakke wrote about the subtle democratization of family life as husbands "adjusted" to the autonomy of their income-earning wives -- but his study left no doubt that putting people back to work was key to psychological as well as economic recovery.

Ultimately, the most striking of Bakke's insights were political. Like others studying the impact of mass unemployment at the time, he was well aware of the dangers it presented to democracy. But he had the more immediate politics of relief in mind. Taking aim at the still-favored mythology that aiding workers would make them dependent on the dole, he documented the extraordinary lengths they would go to first to avoid and then to minimize their reliance on public relief. He also wrote about a subtle shift in working-class attitudes and consciousness, from an individualistic to a more "collective" understanding of self reliance, and of the role of government in providing work and economic security for its citizenry. And here, in a way he could hardly have anticipated when he started the study in 1932, Bakke was picking up on what had become a keynote in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal: employment-centered economic recovery and reform.

From the start of his administration, FDR made putting people back to work a high and visible priority for economic recovery. In 1933, Congress established the Public Works Administration, a massive jobs-generating investment in the nation's public infrastructure that would come to employ millions in construction, engineering, and related industries. This came at the very time the administration was acting to restore confidence in the financial sector through measures such as the Glass-Steagall Banking Act and the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Securities and Exchange Commission -- all in 1933-34.

Pressured to do more amid 25%-plus unemployment rates, the administration soon instituted a series of more direct federal jobs programs, which by 1943 had created jobs for more than 8.5 million people and extended public employment to the nation's social and cultural as well as its civic infrastructure. Employment was also the centerpiece of major economic reforms launched in the Social Security and Wagner Acts of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 - which among them instituted old-age retirement, unemployment insurance, child welfare, wage and hours standards, and rights to collective bargaining that would come to anchor the promise of economic security. These and other New Deal measures were deeply flawed by the racial and gender exclusions they perpetuated. But their lasting legacy can be found in the thousands of schools, parks, bridges, roads, airports, and post offices constructed by public workers; in the extraordinary art, music, theatre, and literary creations federally-employed workers contributed to our cultural heritage; and, as Bakke no doubt appreciated, in the recognition that having citizens with meaningful, well-paid work was a sign of a fully functioning political economy.

This, then, is why Bakke and the workers he wrote about still speak to us, all these decades after The Unemployed Worker and Citizens Without Work first appeared and amidst the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Their thoughts and feelings about the meaning of work are echoed by millions of individuals, families, and communities facing the prospect of a future without it, and by the scores of others taking wage and hours cuts instead. Their resourcefulness in coping with economic hardship was admirable but had its limits, as do the resources of those caught up in the spiraling effects of today's Great Recession.

Their experience, like that of their contemporary counterparts, told them what no dry and detached compilation of economic indicators could: that recovery without jobs is no recovery at all. And their plea, soon crystallized into an organized political demand, was for an economy that would support rather than undermine the needs and aspirations of the people who make it work.

Alice O'Connor is a Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In the wake of the highest unemployment rate in 25 years, the Roosevelt Institute asked historians, economists and other public thinkers to reflect on the lessons of the New Deal and explore new, big ideas for how to get America back to work. Pavlina Tcherneva describes how a much poorer country than ours -- Argentina -- used direct job creation to pull the country out of recession.

What has now become the standard government response to a recession -- pump priming -- is a gamble, and it is time to abandon it as a tool for economic recovery and job growth. It takes too long to produce results and one never knows how much demand the government must pour down a leaky economy to turn it around. It is a risky strategy, which is why President Obama reminded us again on a few days ago that unemployment is a lagging indicator. Yet, there are no good reasons for putting up with high unemployment when we have an effective solution at hand. This is why I add my support to the growing list of those calling for direct job-creation programs.

While policy-makers cling to the astounding belief that the government can neither create jobs nor find enough useful things for the unemployed to do, a much poorer country with presumably fewer resources and less effective government was able to do it just a few years ago. The country is Argentina, which did not settle for a jobless recovery when its economy plunged in its worst post-War recession; instead, it immediately launched a public employment program, known as the Jefes Plan to deal with the crisis.

Just like the New Deal in the 30s, the Jefes plan was up and running in only a few months. In January 2002, the jobs program was signed into law as an emergency measure and five months later it began putting 500,000 people to work. Twelve months after that, it had employed 2 million people, or 13% of the labor force. The program offered a part-time, minimum wage public sector job to any unemployed head of household willing to work in a community project. The price tag of the Jefes plan was less than 1% of GDP.

Unemployment did not wait for the economy to recover to start falling. Instead, even before GDP posted its first positive growth numbers, the unemployment rate had already fallen by 25% -- from its peak of 24% in mid-2002 to 18% a year later. It continued falling precipitously as the economy recovered to move into single-digit territory three years after that. This is a dramatic and expedient reduction in the jobless numbers, given their extraordinary levels -- a decline only possible with direct job creation. And the Jefes Plan, by most measures, created much needed and useful work.

In a matter of months, Argentina had organized projects at the federal, state, and local levels. These included large-scale infrastructure investments and massive recycling initiatives, water irrigation and soil renewal projects, healthcare and daycare centers, food kitchens and homeless shelters, public libraries and recreational programs, subsistence farming and elderly care programs, family violence attention centers and many others. Public sector jobs provided employment, income, on-the-job training, and education to participants. Projects transformed communities and had a positive impact on women and children. Parents who took the Jefes jobs enrolled their kids in school and took them for routine health checkups and vaccinations, as per program requirements. Women turned up for work in large numbers as heads of households and produced useful output, participated in community rebuilding, and took leadership roles in the organization of these projects. Jefes spurred private-sector job creation as well (estimates place the multiplier effect of the program at 2.57), and many workers transitioned from their public Jefes jobs to better-paid private sector employment.

While in the U.S. Congress keeps extending unemployment benefits, the Argentine government chose to put the unemployed to work. When our politicians forecast a jobless recovery ahead, policy makers south of the equator speak of reaching full employment by creating and safeguarding jobs by private and public means.

It is no coincidence that macroeconomic stabilization programs that contain an explicit direct job creation package produce robust job creation and economic growth more quickly and vigorously than the unreliable and inefficient pump-priming approach.

If the U.S. government creates a permanent, voluntary public employment program that offers a living-wage job to anyone ready, willing, and able to work in a public service project, unemployment will be addressed directly as it develops during recessions. And this very same program will serve to turn the economy around. Such a program will fluctuate counter-cyclically with the business cycle, and unemployment will no longer be a lagging indicator. As the economy recovers, public service workers can move back into private-sector jobs.

If Argentina was able to find productive work for its unemployed, surely the U.S. could do it too. It is time to abandon the wasteful pump-priming model along with defeatist attitudes about government job creation. It's time for a Rooseveltian resolve.

Pavlina R. Tcherneva is an assistant professor of Economics at Franklin and Marshall College and a research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability.

Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.

With the first anniversary of the historic election of President Obama, a good deal of interest has emerged in the media about what achievements the President can point to now that he has passed this historic milestone. Certainly the President deserves credit for passing the stimulus bill, stabilizing the financial markets and moving health care reform closer to realization. He also deserves credit for inspiring a new generation of Americans to take up community service through the Serve America Act and for opening up the government to greater transparency. But as this year draws to a close his critics fear that he may fall short on a host of issues from the environment to Guantanamo. Even his vehement promise to pass a health care reform bill within his first year in office now seems suspect, leading to a growing sense of unease among the electorate about his ultimate ability to deliver the change he promised during the campaign.

One way to gauge how President Obama is doing is compare his accomplishments with those of Franklin Roosevelt one year after his historic election in 1932. After all, both leaders also took office in the midst of a global economic crisis that left the US economy in shambles, nor should forget that both leaders assumed power having to face a pernicious evil abroad. In FDR's case, fascism in Europe and Asia; in Obama's, a religiously based extremist ideology committed to acts of terror as well as on-going wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is no question that on the domestic/economic front, no President has accomplished more or is ever likely to accomplish more than FDR did in his first year in office. In his first 100 days alone, for example, FDR successfully brought an abrupt end to a paralytic banking crisis; established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; initiated major financial reform through the Glass-Steagall Act's separation of commercial and investment banking; employed 100s of thousands of idle young men and launched our nation's first truly green jobs program in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC); rescued millions of homes and farms from foreclosure through the establishment of the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the passage of the Farm Credit Act; launched our nation's first major public utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); and began the process of building the economic infrastructure of the country through such programs as the Public Works Administration.

In the area of foreign policy, however, FDR not only accomplished much less, but in fact established something of a negative image abroad through his decision to focus on domestic as opposed to foreign policy issues and more specifically though his decision to reject a temporary currency stabilization agreement that had been worked out among British, American and other officials at the 1933 World Economic Conference in London. The one foreign policy accomplishment that Roosevelt could point to in 1933 was his recognition of the Soviet Union-a move which hinted at FDR's early awareness of the need to counter Japan's growing power in Asia, but which was also in keeping with his focus on a domestic economic recovery as the USSR was seen as a potential market for surplus American goods.

President Obama's foreign policy challenges in his first year have been much more daunting than FDR's and he deserves credit for bringing about a significant improvement in the overall US position in the world through improved relations with Russia, the European Community, the United Nations and even our closest friend and ally, Canada.

He has also stuck to his promise to reduce America's presence in Iraq and focus instead on the conflict in Afghanistan-a move which has not been easy as the true cost of such an effort has finally been brought home to an American public that to date has largely ignored this conflict-and he has been much more engaged in the international effort to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Indeed, unlike FDR, who thanks to the nature of the threat and the mood of the country at the time did not have to confront fascism head on during his first year, President Obama has had to deal with major foreign policy issues since day one. And while the wars he inherited may not be popular, he has yet to make a major misstep in either conflict and has instead chosen to act deliberatively and cautiously, which is itself is a significant accomplishment given the newness of his administration and the war weariness of the public.

On balance then, it seems reasonable to argue that in the area of foreign policy, President Obama has easily exceeded FDR's record for his first year in office. Given the unprecedented nature of the economic crisis that FDR inherited, and the unprecedented response of both the Roosevelt Administration and Congress, it also seems reasonable to argue that no President-Obama included-is ever likely to match the domestic legislative record that was achieved in 1933. But FDR did much more than pass flurry of legislation. He committed himself and his government to real reform and in the process restored the faith of the American people in their government and in the democratic process. The real question is whether President Obama will be willing and able to do the same.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.

To mark the 80th Anniversary of the Great Crash of ‘29, we asked 15 progressive thinkers to write about lessons learned and what lies ahead. Together, their reflections constitute a New Agenda for America — a message of how the ideals of a fair society should apply to the economic and social policies of our time.

Much like Herbert Hoover, who failed to respond adequately to the fallout from the Crash of 1929, Barack Obama cannot seem to cut himself free from conventional wisdom. The Administration is attempting to reform the unreformable -- to revive a zombie economy full of insolvent banks, instead of shutting them down and restarting them anew as FDR did.

Obama and his advisors must free themselves from the discredited dogmas of neo-liberalism and channel the spirit of FDR's bold experimentation. We need less deficit terrorism. Fiscal policy must be much more oriented to personal balance sheets, not bank balance sheets. We need to turn around the private sector and begin to produce more tax revenue, so that the large deficits would be short-lived.

If we continue down the current path, we slow recovery and court large budget deficits for many years to come. Far better to spend now to create jobs and get the private sector growing again.

We need to make loans truly affordable for households. We need large -cale employment programs that restore households' capacity to pay. We need to deal with the over-supply of homes. And we need swift and cheap bankruptcy procedures that provide households a fresh start.

Most of all, we need to turn the financial system away from the trade-and-fee model and toward a system that focuses on carefully evaluating creditworthiness and on limiting the growth of Ponzi processes over an enduring period of economic growth.

Roosevelt Institute Braintruster Marshall Auerback is a market analyst and commentator.