Yes, another blog is now being launched into the world as I type these words.  Does the world really need yet another blog?  Obviously, there are lots and lots of them already out there--many, many bad ones, but some good ones as well.   There are even lots of good ones out there already dealing with economics and economic policy, which is the focus on this blog as well.  So why take up more cyperspace with this blog, on top of all the other ones already going strong?

The aim of this blog will be to develop, extend, and debate the themes that I present in my new little book, Back to Full Employment.  In my view, creating a full employment economy is absolutely crucial to creating a decent society--that is, a society in which everyone has the right to earn a reasonable living through their own efforts or the efforts of family members and friends.   It's that simple a point. But at the same time, it turns out to be not so simple.  There are large numbers of controversial economic issues around 1) how to get to full employment; 2) how to stay there, once there; and 3) whether full employment should be a basic goal of economic policy to begin with.

I tried to cover lots of territory around these questions in my book.  At the same time, I also tried to keep the book accessible to people who didn't necessarily have heavy technical backgrounds in economics and economic policy, and equally, to people who have lots of other things to think about and do in their lives.  As such, the book is quite short.  It comes in at less than 200 pages total.  But even that pretty low page count is misleading.  That is because my publisher, MIT Press and the Boston Review, decided to make the pages very small, and the book quite compact.  I happen to like the design a lot.  To me, it has the look and feel of something like the classics by Beatrix Potter, such as The Tales of Peter Rabbit, Mrs. Tiggle-Wiggle, Benjamin Bunny, Squirrel Nutkin, and on.  There are some figures in my book, though, unfortunately,  nothing that can compare with the Potter's brilliant illustrations in these books.