Reviews for Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy - John A. Garraty - Paperback

The average rating for Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy - John A. Garraty - Paperback based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-07-28 00:00:00 Tedral Hill * Read the Swedish translation of the book * This is not a book about unemployment in history per se, but rather, as the author himself says in the foreword, a book about how unemployment has been understood and treated in history. As such it goes back to ancient Greece and covers the road of european and american unemployment until the middle of the 1970s. The best part of the book is the parts discussing pre-20th century history. Before the 20th century, or maybe rather before Marx, unemployment as a problem wasn’t really discussed on a theoretical level. Rather it was discussed in a often very practical sense of, for example, who of the beggars was really deserving of aid and who was just begging as an easy way out of having to work (getting a job seemed to have been supposed wouldn’t be a problem if you just wanted one). As such the views discussed by Garraty is directly connected to the material history of working people and the poor. The lack of theoretical discussions brings the history closer to the actual lives of people. When writing the later chapters they become much more focused on individuals and their theoretical treatises about unemployment and to a certain extent how much influence they had on governments in their day. The connection to the lives of ordinary people is lost. There is some discussion about technological unemployment, unemployment because new technology make workers obsolete, which I find interesting in connection to the discussions of today on the subject with fully automated storages and Elon Musks plans for a fully automated car factory. But this isn’t discussed very much, maybe because it was written in the last stages of the golden era with full employment. The hero, although fallen, of the book has to be Keynes who get the credit for having a solution to the unemployment after the great depression. But as said he is a fallen hero since when discussion unemployment in the 1960s and 1970s Garraty does note that the solutions Keynes offered doesn’t seem to work. Keynes solution was to accept a quite high level of inflation to achieve full employment, but in the 60s and 70s there seemed to be a dimishing return to every investment to force down unemployment numbers and instead an increasing rate of higher inflation. All in all I thought it was an interesting book worth a read, but not a second. It deserves more readers than Goodreads indicates it has at least.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-01-26 00:00:00 David Williams I came away from this book thinking that the Monroe Doctrine was used a lot like the Bible is: It had an authority that could justify whatever its proponents believed at the moment. The timing of Perkins' writing was good, since his work was originally published in the 1940s, just before Pearl Harbor and the dying of the separate spheres of Old versus New World.