Unemployment

Excerpt from Unemployment: A Problem of Industry This volume contains a course of lectures delivered in Oxford, during Michaelmas term of the year now ending, for the Delegates of the Common University Fund. Its object is to combine a record of the principal facts of unemployment with a continuous argument as to the causes of unemployment. It includes a good deal of matter from published sources to which in the lectures I merely gave references, and appendices, the most important of which deal with "Public Labour Exchanges in Germany" (reprinted from the Economic Journal for March, 1908) and "Methods of Seeking Employment in Great Britain." I am only too conscious that the treatment given in the following pages to one of the most perplexing and urgent of industrial problems is in many points defective; that, not once but many times, I have been compelled to leave the record of facts or their analysis incomplete, to give probabilities in place of searching for certainties, to turn back unsatisfied from whole fields of inquiry as fascinating as they are important. Among these last is to be 1 mentioned particularly the problem of the underlying causes of cyclical fluctuation in trade and employment. In so far as the main obstacle to further inquiry into these causes has, in my case, been immersion in actual dealing with distress as member of the Central (Unemployed) Body for London during the past three years, I can only hope that the following discussion may prove to have gained on the side of practical experience something to set against what it has lost on the side of theory. After all, whatever may be the underlying causes of cyclical fluctuation, the fact of cyclical fluctuation has to be reckoned with by governments and individuals for many years to come. No analysis of its causes can hope within the range of practical politics, if indeed ever, to dispense with the need for providing against its results. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.