unemployment
I am currently writing an essay on “Are the cures for unemployment simplyt eh reversal of the causes.” My lecturer thinks that trade unions were the cause of unemployment by pricing workers out of jobs. (This would explain, I suppose why Britain had nearly full employment for years after ww2, despite unions beingmuch more effective than now.) I also have to talk about “active labour market policies” such as cutting benefits and forcing people to attend training schemes. should get on with it now. bye.
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Unemployment when exactly? Surely not in the 1930s? This was the outcome of the Great Depression, as everyone knows. Or the 1980s? This coincided with Thatcher’s anti-union legislation. Structural unemployment isn’t caused by unions but in shifts in the patterns in demand. Or to use an example from the time: all those unemployed miners were hardly going to be able to operate a computer in a call-centre now, were they?
Comment by Shuggy @ 11/30/2004 3:23 pm
Indeed. How did the essay go, by the way? Thinking about it, I reckon an appropriate response could be pretty short: “Try coming back and teaching economics when you’ve read some Keynes, you fuckwit.”
Comment by Tim @ 11/30/2004 5:00 pm