All Posts Tagged With: "unemployment"
Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Importance of Failure
In today’s society failure has become something to fear, avoid, and therefore prevent at all costs. Whether it is unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, or bailouts for failing companies, the world seems to view failure as having no redeeming social value. If success is all good and failure is all bad, then it seems as though [...]
26Oct2011 | and Steven Horwitz | 11 comments | ContinuedUnemployment: What Is It?
Unemployment has regained center stage now that the debt crisis has receded from that position, at least for a time. Unless things change dramatically over the next year unemployment will be the number one issue in the forthcoming presidential election. Hardly any proposal will escape being labeled “job-killing” or “job-creating” or both. To begin with [...]
26Oct2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 2 comments | ContinuedRichman Debates Keynesian on The Voice of Russia Radio
I debated a Keynesian economist about the economy and unemployment on The Voice of Russia Radio last week. Listen here (scroll down).
7Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedWhere To Begin?
Choosing the right unit of analysis is more than an academic exercise. It’s a matter of poverty and prosperity, even of death and life.
6Sep2011 | Sandy Ikeda | 3 comments | ContinuedPrivate Investment and Public “Investment”
Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]
22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | ContinuedBlame the Wheel
President Obama says automation accounts for high unemployment today. He really said that. And he said: “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM, you don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.” So maybe [...]
15Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedWar Would End the Recession?
In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result [...]
22Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedAmerica’s Depression within a Depression, 1937–39
The Great Depression in the United States is generally dated as beginning in 1929 and ending in 1941, give or take a year. This has led many commentators to disregard or to pass quickly over the serious depression that began in 1937 and ended—if returning to the 1937 level can be considered a depression’s end—in [...]
22Oct2010 | Robert Higgs | 8 comments | ContinuedNot All Job Destruction Is Creative
When government policy generates booms and busts, it creates unsustainable jobs that eventually will be destroyed.
26Aug2010 | Steven Horwitz | 10 comments | ContinuedFor the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s
The latest New Deal synthesis is For the Survival of Democracy by veteran historian Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University. What makes Hamby’s research design different is that he describes the development of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in an international context. Specifically, he weaves the American narrative with events in Britain and Germany in [...]
8Jul2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomy Loses Jobs
The government discharged the temporary census workers, and the economy lost a net 125,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate dropped to 9.5 percent — because discouraged people left the work force. The Keynesian strategy for recovery is a rousing success.
2Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedProducing Jobs: Thoughts on Obama’s Plan for Small Businesses
The ears of small business America must have perked up when President Obama spoke about that critically important sector in his State of the Union address. Mine certainly did. Here’s when it really got interesting: “I’m . . . proposing a new small business tax credit—one that will go to over one million small businesses [...]
20May2010 | Bruce Yandle | 2 comments | ContinuedComparing the Great Depression to the Great Recession
President Obama has often remarked that the Great Recession (2008–10) is the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. It’s interesting to study the many parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression. Causation. The main causes of both crises lie in actions of the federal government. In the case of the Great Depression, [...]
20May2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 47 comments | ContinuedMust We Live in Long-Term Recession?
There is an alternative, one that will lead to economic recovery, more wealth, and higher living standards.
24Feb2010 | William L. Anderson | 11 comments | ContinuedWhere the Jobs Are
Robert Higgs, editor of The Independent Review and a Freeman columnist, has a revealing article on today’s employment and unemployment. Juicy tidbit: Total employment peaked in 2007 at 137.6 million persons on nonfarm payrolls, fell slightly in 2008, and then dropped precipitously in 2009 to 132.0 persons, for a two-year loss of 5.6 million jobs. [...]
12Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedTGIF: Snow Job Summit
What are the odds that yesterday’s White House jobs summit will lead to the creation of any real jobs? The summit was based on the magic theory of government: Say the right incantations and reality will be reshaped according to one’s desires. There are no economic laws. There is only will. If we all think [...]
4Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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