Tag Archives: unemployment

The Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter To You: Part Two, the Record Since 1930

Posted on August 25, 2013 by | 13 comments

By Joe Firestone

In Part One, of a critique of the most important of “Fix the Debt’s” reasons for “Why the National Debt Should Matter To You,” I asserted that high debt levels haven’t caused high unemployment in the United States, and that, if anything causation was in the other direction. I didn’t want to disturb the flow of the argument there with a relatively lengthy survey of some of the numbers in the historical record since the 1930s. But let’s test the idea that High debt causes fewer jobs and lower wages in the United States by looking at that record now.

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The Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter To You: Part One, High Debt Levels and Jobs

Posted on August 24, 2013 by | 28 comments

By Joe Firestone

I came across a post from the “Fix the Debt” campaign last month called “The Top Five Worst Reasons Why the National Debt Should Matter to You.” It’s a post full of debt/deficit lies that cry out for correction. That’s what I’ll provide in this series. Continue reading →

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Beyond Pity and Safety Nets

Posted on July 2, 2013 by | 25 comments

By Dan Kervick

Paul Krugman is justifiably appalled at what he calls the “war on the unemployed”, the accelerating right-wing campaign to subdue, discipline and pauperize the jobless.  Yet there is nothing new in this campaign.  Economic conservatives and market fundamentalists have always tended to believe that the private enterprise system is both self-correcting and stringently just, and that unemployment results from a misguided combination of indulgent maternal do-gooding and inept government interference with the austere and efficient rectitude of market operations.  The fundamentalists believe unemployment happens because artificial minimum wage laws prevent wages from falling as far as they need to fall to clear the labor market, and that unemployment insurance compounds the problem by seducing potential workers into an unsustainable, dead-end limbo on the dole when they should be swallowing their strong laissez faire medicines and the bitter wages that go with them.  After all, if these dregs and flops were worth more handsome wages, then the Invisible Hand would have already dispensed those wages to them, right?

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The Layman’s Case Against Austerity

Posted on May 4, 2013 by | 48 comments

By Stephanie Kelton

Steve Kraske of The Kansas City Star recently interviewed me for a piece about austerity.  The story ran in today’s paper. It doesn’t provide much depth (unlike bloggers, journalists have strict space constraints!), so I followed up with a few comments on the Star’s website.  I thought I’d share them here, since I’m always trying to improve the way I communicate these ideas with non-economists.  So here’s my best effort to make the anti-austerity case in simple terms. Continue reading →

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Twenty Numbers From Europe that Should Have You Very Worried

Posted on May 1, 2013 by | 25 comments

By Russell Huntley (via e-mail)

#1 The unemployment rate in France has surged to 10.6 percent, and the number of jobless claims in that country recently set a new all-time record.

#2 Unemployment in the eurozone as a whole is sitting at an all-time record of 12 percent. Continue reading →

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Comparing Unemployment During the Great Depression and the Great Recession

Posted on April 5, 2013 by | 4 comments

By William K. Black

Barry Eichengreen’s and Tim Hatton’s January 1988 paper entitled “Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective” is a useful starting point for any effort to compare unemployment during the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

It is useful to begin by recognizing three related cautions that the authors make in that paper.  First, the modern sense of the term “unemployment” (willing and able to work, but unable to find a job commensurate with the worker’s skills) was not common until the decades before the Great Depression.  The prior assumption was that people were unemployed because they were lazy.  There was little understanding of business cycles or inadequate demand, little sympathy for the unemployed, and no sense that business or government were primarily responsible for the the level of unemployment.  This meant that keeping data on unemployment was rarely a concern of government.  Data on unemployment in Europe was largely collected through industrial trade unions.

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The Dangerous Collapse of Public Enterprise

Posted on February 4, 2013 by | 45 comments

By Dan Kervick

When economists talk about the role of government in economic recovery, they often focus on the question of whether or not we need more economic stimulus.  They ask whether the government should temporarily change its fiscal policies – its taxing and spending decisions – to add some additional publicly financed spending to the economy and help jolt the private sector back to life.  Continue reading →

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Full Employment as the New Progressive Paradigm

Posted on December 19, 2012 by | 60 comments

By Dan Kervick

Part Two of a four-part essay

In Part One of this essay, I evoked the dismal state of the progressive movement in the developed world, and proposed that as part of the effort to turn this situation around progressives should embrace the political ideal of a full employment economy, with an activist government permanently standing ready to provide a productive job for every person who is both willing and able to work, but who is unable to find work in the private sector.

I would hope people of every political stripe would see value in a full employment economy.  But my argument here is aimed at progressives specifically.  I want to explain why, given the kinds of defining values they have traditionally embraced – democracy, equality, solidarity and progress – progressives should be drawn to the full employment ideal.  I will first explain why, in my view, progressives should view the pursuit of a full employment economy as a political, economic and moral imperative, and embrace the full employment cause as a foundation for progressive political revival.  I will then set out a few basic proposals about how a full employment economy might be structured.

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The Emancipation of the Unemployed

Posted on September 3, 2012 by | 20 comments

By Dan Kervick

An important anniversary is approaching.  On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed and issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  The proclamation that sounded the final end of the depraved institution of American slavery was presented to the nation and the world as an emergency war act, a “fit and necessary” measure for suppressing an armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States.  The language of the Emancipation Proclamation is restrained by the customary legalisms of government writ; and yet, vibrating through and beyond the tight cords of executive propriety, the drama and permanence of Lincoln’s statement sound clearly, along with the solemn national commitment to sustain the liberation of the newly freed men and women by force of arms:

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

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Men on a Wall

Posted on August 20, 2012 by | 19 comments

By J.D. Alt

I recently saw a newspaper photo of ten or twelve men sitting on a crumbling stone wall beside a dirt road. It was somewhere in Africa, but the location doesn’t matter. What matters is that the men, as the caption made clear, were sitting on the wall because they had nothing else to do: they had no land to farm, there was no local job or employment available to them, they had no savings or credit with which to start some venture. Continue reading →

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