The Importance of Money by H.W. Arndt

Author:H.W. Arndt [Arndt, H.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351762502
Google: Ux8uDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-12T04:34:17+00:00

Planning for Post-war Full Employment

“Next to war, unemployment has been the most widespread, most insidious and most corroding malady of our generation: it is the specific social disease of western countries in our time” (The Times, 23 January 1943). So deeply and widely was this felt that Paul Samuelson was merely voicing a general consensus when he said, in a volume on Post-war Economic Problems that “the most important of [these] problems is that of providing for continuing full employment” (Harris 1943, p. 27). The post-war problem loomed as both a short-term and a long-term one. With post-World War I experience in mind, a severe post-war depression was widely expected; Samuelson predicted immediate post-war unemployment in the USA of 5 million; other predictions ran as high as 19 millions (Lekachman 1967, p. 136). Hansen feared a long-term problem: “This is the essence of secular stagnation: recoveries…leave a hard and seemingly immovable core of unemployment” (Hansen 1939, p. 370).

Full employment figures prominently among the plans for a better post-war world which engaged much of British and American public opinion, in a wave of idealism amidst the horrors of war. They poured forth in a torrent of articles, pamphlets and studies and were discussed in countless public meetings and in adult and army education classes. Official thinking about full employment after the war began in England as early as February 1941 when John Jewkes, Director of the Economic Section of the War Cabinet Secretariat, invited James Meade to examine the means by which a high and stable level of employment could be maintained beyond the end of the war (Cornish 1981, p. 1). In 1943, Sir William Beveridge published his report on Social Security, the blueprint for Britain’s post-war welfare state. Meade wrote to Keynes: “The great public support which the Beveridge Report has received has suggested to me that there ought to be a similar publication on the subject of post-war unemployment” (which would incidentally provide an opportunity to explain to the public that the immediate post-war problem may be inflation rather than unemployment, though after two years, he added, we may be back in the 1930s). “What we really require is a Keynes Report to follow up the Beveridge Report” (Letter to Keynes, 8 January 1943, in Keynes 1980, p. 14f.). Keynes was unenthusiastic, but Meade pushed on. A Steering Committee on Post-War Employment was appointed in July 1943 to oversee the preparation of a White Paper. Meanwhile, Beveridge was preparing his unofficial report on Full Employment in a Free Society (Beveridge 1944). Both appeared almost simultaneously in 1944, the White Paper under the sober title Employment Policy (White Paper 1944).

The British White Paper stimulated similar work in other countries, including the USA and Australia. In the USA, Senator Murray’s Full Employment Bill finally passed Congress in the much attenuated form of the Employment Act of 1946 which aimed merely at “conditions under which there will be afforded useful employment for those able, willing and seeking work, and to promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power” (Lekachman 1967, p.

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