Job guarantee on “Mule Bites”

It’s official! The Mule Bites podcast has been launched.

Regular readers will know that I travelled to Newcastle at the beginning of the month for the 12th annual CofFEE conference. Conference organiser and director of CofFEE, Professor Bill Mitchell, was kind enough to allow me to interview him after the conference. Fortunately, a couple of failed attempts to get the recorder to work did not exhaust Bill’s patience and I ended up with about half an hour of audio covering both Bill’s idea of a “job guarantee” to achieve full employment and a discussion of the nature of money. The workings of fiat money is a subject I have discussed a number of times here on the blog, so I thought that the job guarantee would make a good first podcast topic.

For those not satisfied with the 16 minutes in this podcast, I am planning another episode with the money discussion and will also make the full, unedited interview available.

Audio credits: Mule Bites theme by ToastCorp, train sounds CC by Robinhood76.

UPDATE: there were some balance problems in the audio mix, which have now been improved. Thanks for the feedback, keep it coming! I am well on my way to learning basic audio engineering.

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5 thoughts on “Job guarantee on “Mule Bites”

  1. Magpie

    Hey Stubborn,

    Whoever said that “video killed the radio star”, didn’t know about the Stubborn Mule!

    Really cool, man. Like senexx said, it reminds us of the BBC radio interviews. Very professional, actually.

    Move over right-wing DJs and shock-jocks, because the Mule is in town.

  2. Magpie

    Hey Anonymouse,

    Well, if it’s a matter of suggesting improvements, I’d change the sound-track.

    Something like RATM “Killing in the Name”:

    Rammstein “Amerika” (English lyrics!):

    NIN “The Hand that Feeds”:

    The Pixies “Where is my Mind?”:

    From that, the Mule could get the emotional clue for his voice…

  3. Zebra

    Great piece Dr Mule – very professionally produced. But I have some issues with Bill’s solution to full employment. It sounds a lot like “working for the dole to me” – his two examples were “environmental work” which seemed to involve rubbish collection and manual work and aged care. Now I know a bit about long-term unemployment and I can’t say that my aspirations as an unemployed 46yo with a Ph.D. in mathematics involved picking up rubbish. I also know a bit about aged care having spent 8 mths in a hospital rehab ward populated mostly by pension age stroke victims. It is to our eternal shame as a society that older people are given such poor treatment (where the Govts formula for how much to spend on care is based on extending your years of productive employment) but I don’t think the answer is to put some our most vulnerable (and in many cases sick) citizens in the care of unqualified and possibly unmotivated people.

    I suggest Bill take a six month sabbatical and spend half in a basic level manual job and half working in aged care and see what he thinks about his “solution”. I am not suggesting he isn’t genuine in his desire to solve the problems of full employment I just don’t think these are worthwhile options for the majority of the unemployed.

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