The Possibility of Full Employment

Abstract

It is time for some good news. Our economies, just two decades ago, were able to deliver unemployment and inflation rates of around two or three per cent. Now unemployment is at ten per cent or more, and inflation fluctuates wildly. Is the decline irreversible? In this chapter I will argue that it is not; that it is, in principle, feasible for us to match, or even better, the economic performance of the best years of the 1950s and 1960s. Establishing that this goal is feasible is not a trivial exercise, since the well-entrenched neoclassical orthodoxy within economics, and a good deal of prejudice among the public at large, must be squarely confronted.

‘The first function of unemployment is that it maintains the authority of master over man.’

W. H. BEVERIDGE