I'm heartbroken to say we lost my brother, Steven Attewell yesterday morning after a long struggle with cancer.

I'll put personal feelings and thoughts elsewhere, but given his and my community here, I want to talk about Steve's political and intellectual contributions.

🧵:

2/ At their core, Steve's contributions boiled down to a simple idea.

Contemporary left govts were being fatally held back by a lack of political imagination, and we should look to history to rediscover the radical possibilities of democratic politics.

3/ This was expressed in his powerful book, 'People Must Live By Work: Direct Job Creation in America From FDR to Reagan', that came out of his dissertation at UC Santa Barbara:
pennpress.org/9780812295313/…

I'll try to lay out some of the key contributions below.

4/The book argues govt could end unemployment by directly hiring the unemployed (Direct Job Creation, DJC).

That New Deal programs like the WPA offered proof of concept.

And that DJC's sidelining was due not to policy failures, but rejection within liberal economics circles.

5/ Ch 3 argues that the New Deal, not WWII, ended the Great Depression.

Dominant claims of its failures stemmed from data which classified workers in New Deal jobs programs (millions of people) as unemployed.

Reanalysis suggested public jobs helped reduce unempl. to 6% by 1941