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Some Alternative Views of The Unemployment Problem in The United States

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Abstract

The stubborn persistence of high rates of unemployment in the United States has provoked an equally pertinacious controversy over its cause. Regarding the main facts of unemployment itself, there is no dispute. The real issue is one of casual interpretation and remedial actions. I shall argue that unemployment is inevitably structural in character but largely not so in cause; that to the extent that it is structural in cause the main trouble lies in wages and prices, and not in a novel revolutionary process of change that is now supposedly wrecking the operation of the market as a mechanism for allocating labour in a free economy.

I am indebted to Professors Duncan M. MacIntyre, Robert L. Raimn, and Fred Slavick for very helpful discussions and criticism. This paper, particularly part IV on ‘Wage-Price Behaviour’, has been revised for publication.

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Authors
  1. George H. Hildebrand
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Director, School of Labor and Industrial Relations, and Professor of Economics, Michigan State University, USA

    Jack Stieber

Copyright information

© 1966 International Institute for Labour Studies

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Cite this chapter

Hildebrand, G.H. (1966). Some Alternative Views of The Unemployment Problem in The United States. In: Stieber, J. (eds) Employment Problems of Automation and Advanced Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00444-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00444-7_9

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-00446-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-349-00444-7

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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