Monetary austerity deliberately manufactures unemployment to compress wages.

Evidence

In July 2024, high interest rates achieved their primary goal of increasing the unemployment rate by a percentage point in one year. An additional 1.3 million Americans were without work—not counting the more than half a million workers who were forced to accept part-time, precarious positions because of a lack of full-time opportunities. While many critical economists dispute that high interest rates actually help tame inflation—especially if it is a profit-driven one—what is indisputable is that through monetary austerity, Fed officials create the conditions for wage compression: people are no longer able to hold off from accepting crummy jobs with lousy pay. And this is what ultimately matters. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 284

In July 2024, high interest rates achieved their primary goal of increasing the unemployment rate by a percentage point in one year. An additional 1.3 million Americans were without work—not counting the more than half a million workers who were forced to accept part-time, precarious positions because of a lack of full-time opportunities. While many critical economists dispute that high interest rates actually help tame inflation—especially if it is a profit-driven one—what is indisputable is that through monetary austerity, Fed officials create the conditions for wage compression: people are no longer able to hold off from accepting crummy jobs with lousy pay. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 284

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Concrete recent US data supporting the austerity-as-class-discipline thesis — could support a follow-up quantifying the wage-compression mechanism behind the sacrifice narrative.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘unemployment as policy outcome’ — how central banks openly target joblessness as a tool, with the 2024 Fed data as the case study.
• XREF: Connects to readings on the Phillips Curve tradeoff assumptions and Keynesian vs. monetarist inflation theory. — connects to: Technological abundance produces mass unemployment treated as reserve army material.; Britain’s gold-standard austerity doubled unemployment from 10.4 to 22.1 percent — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 514; U.S. officials viewed unemployment as a deliberate worker-discipline tool. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 18 (+21 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 284; Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 284