While unemployment is damaging many, it falls most heavily upon all, except the _________________.
The concentrated incidence of unemployment among specific groups in the population
means far greater costs to society than car be measured simply in hours of involuntary idleness or dollars of income lost. The extra costs include disruption of the careers of young people, increased juvenile delinquency, and perpetuation of conditions which breed racial discrimination in employment and otherwise deny equality of opportunity.
There is another and more subtle cost. The social and economic strains of prolonged underutilization create strong pressures from cost-increasing solutions.... On the side of labour, prolonged high unemployment leads to “share-the-work” pressures for sho
rter hours, intensifies resistance to technological change and to rationalization of work rules, and, in general, increases incentives for restrictive and inefficient measures to protect existing jobs. On the side of business, the weakness of markets leads to attempts to raise prices to cover high average overhead costs and to pressures for protection against foreign and domestic competition. On the side of agriculture, high prices are necessary to achieve income objectives when urban and industrial demand for foods and fibres is depressed and lack of opportunities for jobs and higher incomes in industry keep people on the farm. In all these cases, the problems are real and the claims understandable. But the solutions suggested raise costs and promote inefficiency. By no means the least of the advantages of full utilization will be a diminution of these pressures. They will be weaker, and they can be more firmly resisted in good conscience, when markets are generally strong and job opportunities are plentiful.
The demand for labour is derived from the demand for the goods and services which labour participates in producing. Thus, employment will be reduced to 4 percent of the labour force only when demand for the myriad of goods and services -automobiles, clothing, food, haircuts, electric generators, highways, and so on - is sufficiently great in total to require the productive efforts of 96 per cent of the civilian labour force.
Although many goods are initially produced as materials or components to meet demands related to the further production of other goods, all goods (and services) are ultimately destined to satisfy demands that can, for convenience, be classified into four categories: consumer demand, business demand for new plants and machinery and for additions to inventories, net export demand of foreign buyers, and demand of government units, Federal, state, and local. Thus gross national product (GNP), our total output. is the sum of four major components of expenditure; personal consumption expenditures, gross private domestic investment, net exports, and government purchases of goods and services.
The primary line of attack on the problem of unemployment must be through measures which will expand one or more of these components of demand. Once a satisfactory level of employment has been achieved in a growing economy, economic stability requires the maintenance of a continuing balance between growing productive capacity and growing demand. Action to expand demand is called for not only when demand actually declines and recession appears but even when the rate of growth of demand falls short of the rate of growth capacity.