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

6/ The book tackles struggles over DJC over the whole postwar period.

But fast forwarding a lot, the intellectual rejection of DJC in liberal circles left the Democratic Party without the policy tools to decisively end the Great Recession of 2008.

7/ A quote of his that encapsulated Steve: 'The purpose of policy history is not merely to trace where we have come from and why, but to show us the paths not traveled, the tools discarded and forgotten but still useful, so that we can make use of them in the here and now.'

8/ The conclusion argues that the level of unemployment is ultimately a political decision: 'what level of unemployment do we want in America?'

Steve advocates that 'direct job creation could and should be used today,' and lays out a program to end unemployment, in peacetime.

9/ His book builds historical scaffolding for activists and heterodox economists pushing for a #JobGuarantee : among others, Stephanie Kelton, Pavlina R Tcherneva, Nathan Tankus, Rohan Grey, Raúl Carrillo, James Galbraith.

If the DJC worked before internet and phones, it can work today.

10/ Steve believed in his bones that unemployment was an indefensible waste of human potential.

That everyone had something to contribute to the common good.

And that this couldn't be more important given the total mobilization needed to take on the climate crisis.

11/ He felt the radical horizons of democratic policymaking required both pressure from below & the ideas of experts and bureaucrats in govt.

This required a strong labor movement, creative, organized left intellectuals and policymakers, and a realignment of the Democratic Party

12/ Steve was a Democrat, a Social Democrat, a Socialist, and a union man-- and saw no inherent contradiction between these.

Please read and spread his book, which I believe is a profound contribution towards an egalitarian and humane future.