Raúl Carrillo and Mark Paul, two outstanding young leaders in movements for economic, social, and climate justice, were recently elected co-chairs of the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity.*
The Full Employment Seminar was founded in 1987 by Columbia Professor Sumner Rosen and other academics and activists who would go on to establish the National Jobs for All Network in 1994. In the years following the disappointing results of a second attempt by Congress to enact full employment, the goal of a job guarantee enjoyed little public interest. A group of academics and activists, still convinced that guaranteeing living-wage work for all was both feasible and highly desirable, began meeting to discuss means of reviving interest and support for full employment. Rosen envisioned that the Seminar would help these advocates of full employment to continue to develop and refine their thinking about the right to employment and their ability to contribute to its political resurgence.
The central purpose of the Seminar is to “identify and clarify the more difficult and central intellectual questions which relate to and affect the national commitment and capability to assure full employment over long periods.” For more about the Seminar, the topics it has taken up, its outstanding academics and activists from the US and abroad—including three Nobel laureates, the conferences and public meetings it has sponsored, and the publications based on ideas presented to the Seminar, please see an article on the Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity in a collection of essays on the University Seminars at Columbia University. [1]
Over the years, Professors Helen Lachs Ginsburg, June Zaccone, and, most recently, Sheila D. Collins and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg have led the Seminar. Trudy Goldberg will continue to serve with Raúl Carrillo and Mark Paul as co-chairs. Carrillo and Paul will bring to the Seminar their combination of scholarship and social activism and their access to cutting-edge thinkers and activists in the quest for social, economic, and earth justice.
Raúl Carrillo has a B.A. from Harvard College with a concentration in the social sciences and a law degree from Columbia Law School. He was a research scholar at Yale Law School and Deputy Director of the Law and Political Economy Project from 2020 to the present, helping to develop an international network of scholars, practitioners, and students to advance the study of law and political economy. Carrillo was a founding board member of the Modern Money Network which engages in research and public education regarding the financing and legal design of direct job creation programs and was a co-drafter of Rep. Ianna Pressley’s Job Guarantee Resolution in the House of Representatives. He is an Academic Fellow at Columbia Law.
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Mark Paul has B.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California and a postdoctoral researcher. at Duke University. Professor Paul’s research examines the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to inequality in the United States. He is the author of The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Mark Paul’s research and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, Washington Post, The Financial Times, Dissent, and other publications.
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* Readers interested in joining the Full Employment Seminar are invited to contact Co-Chair Trudy Goldberg, trudygoldberg [at] njfac.org