Towards Full Employment

This book presents the proceedings of a conference on labour markets. It advances thinking on new policy measures, such as active labour market policies and measures to "make work pay".

At the time in which this book was first published in 1987, mass unemployment had emerged as the dominant, most visible, problem of the West European economies. The post-war experience of expansion was remarkable in that it experienced growth high enough to sustain a consensus on the possibility and desirability of full employment. This period declined into one of poor economic performance in the 1970s. Growth slowed and the subsequent years were characterised by painful adjustment and dislocation. In this challenging discussion of ways to overcome unemployment Ciaran Driver stresses the importance of managed restructuring. Driver focuses attention of the role of investment in fixed assets and human resources, and argues that governments do have a major role in steering the economy through a period of turbulent change, and that there are policies which can move the economy towards full employment. This book is ideal for students of business and economics.

Economist Robert Pollin argues that the United States needs to try to implement full employment and how it can help the economy.

This study provides an overview of the current global employment situation. It examines the effectiveness of existing policies and how many of them fall short in today's economic climate.

This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. Reissued with a fresh Introduction by the Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman and a new Afterword by Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky, this important work is made available to a new generation. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money transformed economics and changed the face of modern macroeconomics. Keynes’ argument is based on the idea that the level of employment is not determined by the price of labour, but by the spending of money. It gave way to an entirely new approach where employment, inflation and the market economy are concerned. Highly provocative at its time of publication, this book and Keynes’ theories continue to remain the subject of much support and praise, criticism and debate. Economists at any stage in their career will enjoy revisiting this treatise and observing the relevance of Keynes’ work in today’s contemporary climate.

For centuries we've believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance--in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn't work, you didn't eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself. In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem--why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that "full employment" is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world--and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

At the time in which this book was first published in 1987, mass unemployment had emerged as the dominant, most visible, problem of the West European economies. The post-war experience of expansion was remarkable in that it experienced growth high enough to sustain a consensus on the possibility and desirability of full employment. This period declined into one of poor economic performance in the 1970s. Growth slowed and the subsequent years were characterised by painful adjustment and dislocation. In this challenging discussion of ways to overcome unemployment Ciaran Driver stresses the importance of managed restructuring. Driver focuses attention of the role of investment in fixed assets and human resources, and argues that governments do have a major role in steering the economy through a period of turbulent change, and that there are policies which can move the economy towards full employment. This book is ideal for students of business and economics.