After the election, Theresa May promised to help out Tory MPs in “dire financial situations” after losing their seats. It was met with precisely the derision you’d expect. A party that has spent seven years trying to starve people into jobs that aren’t there has suddenly discovered the downsides of involuntary unemployment. The heart truly bleeds.

It is overambitious to expect any insight to trickle into Tory thinking off the back of this. As the party political wing of the Just World Fallacy, their entire policy set is based on erroneous “clap louder to make the economy go faster” thinking that disregards structural impediments to income and employment in favour of a 19th-century moralist approach where the only thing preventing you getting a job is some unaddressed flaw in your character. For the rest of us, though, this is just an example of an obvious truth: It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how much you want it, if there’s only one job available and you’re the candidate that comes in second, you still haven’t got a job.

The unavailability of jobs is a problem that looks likely to get worse rather than better. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that up to around 30% of UK jobs may be lost to automation in the future. This would increase productivity but leave more people out of work, a trade-off that we’ve still not had the courage to grapple with as a society.

Sensibly discarding “aspiration” as the sole engine of employment and growth, we must turn our attention to the structures and mechanisms of the economy itself. John Maynard Keynes said, back in 1933: “Look after the unemployment, and the budget will look after itself.” Historically that has held mostly true.

Keynes, however, didn’t foresee the immense rise in jobs that don’t provide enough income to cover basic needs, nor the dedication of governments to preserving unsustainable rent to wage ratios. We have created an economy over the last 35 years that rewards managers who can “innovatively” pay people less and less money, and propped up consumption by innovatively lending them more and more money at interest. Such astonishing recklessness has left the weakened foundations of our economy struggling to hold up the weight of the bloated oligarchs at the top of the pile.

Some post-Keynesian economists have been trying to popularise a new idea to tackle these structural problems: a programme known interchangeably as the job guarantee (JG) or employer of last resort (ELR). Rather than waiting for money to “trickle down” from tax breaks, bank bailouts, or other investment, JG proponents argue the government should simply directly employ people.

Rather than going to the jobcentre to jump through hoops in order to qualify for an income that barely enables people to subsist, people will simply be offered a job and paid at a “base wage”. Employees are hired “off the bottom”, unlike programmes that aim to stimulate the economy and create jobs in the private sector, which usually take the most-skilled first. The jobs would be designed around the work that needs doing in our society but which the private sector sees no profit in doing.

The advantages are laid out clearly by its advocates, among whom few are more prolific or evangelical than Pavlina Tcherneva at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, New York. They claim that among other things a JG provides an “automatic economic stabiliser” with built-in inflation controls. Unlike existing welfare and workfare programmes, this system is designed not to write off the unemployed and depress wages, but to empower them and provide a wage floor.

The “reserve labour force”, rather than being unemployed, gets an income for work, and society gets work of social value in return. The private sector, should it want them, can offer this reserve labour force better wages or a chance of career advancement to tempt them away from JG jobs, but unscrupulous employers could no longer threaten their employees with poverty to get away with mistreating them.

In ordinary circumstances, the work available to the low paid is mostly bad for them. The purpose and structure that a good job brings can be good for you. Unemployment, to the extent it robs those things from the workless, can be bad. But for those in the precariat, the insecurity and lack of control can have a negative impact on mental health. A bad job is worse than no job at all. Slack labour markets also mean employers can get away with high rates of wage theft. Guaranteed jobs aimed at providing a social purpose not only provide the economic benefits of full employment and protect employees from exploitation, but also improve mental health outcomes by giving people better, more meaningful work.

Tcherneva uses Argentina’s Plan Jefes as an example of how a JG programme has worked in the past. Referring to Amartya Sen’s conception of “substantive freedoms … to choose a life one has reason to value”, she points out that many of the participants in Jefes were low-income women who wanted to help their communities and learn new skills, but most importantly to do something. Simple income-support programmes, while alleviating the immediate problems of poverty, were considered less preferable to income-paying jobs. The JG provided a means for people to “actively participate in collectively addressing their own and their communities’ needs”.

While many JG advocates claim it is in opposition to other kinds of poverty-reduction policies, there are also ecumenical types who see it fitting in with other potential reforms such as a universal basic income, with UBI and JG programmes being complementary rather than oppositional. This is a sensible approach. It is a rare economic policy that can work by itself, rather than as part of a series of reforms. Both of these policies challenge the received wisdom of the economic status quo, and it’s this broad approach that’s needed as much as any individual policy suggestion.

In truth the “utopian” aspect of these programmes is not anything to do with their actual implementation – it is the shift change in the public imagination that would be required first. We have been shackled for decades by the idea that jobs come from the largesse of the bloated millionaire class, and that if we deny them their right to make jobs low paid, dangerous and stressful that they won’t make any jobs at all, leaving us to starve like baby birds abandoned by their mother. The job guarantee invites us to think: what if that’s not true? What if we don’t need to pander to the demands of those who profit from the parasite economy? What if we could set the rules about who the economy is for? For that reason alone, it’s worth discussing.