Monday, December 27, 2010

Three New Acquisitions




















The Metaphysical Club, which I will start reading very soon.













Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs, on arguments over technological unemployment.

And Cycles of Unemployment in the United States, 1903-1922. This book was published in 1923. It was the winner of an essay prize held by the Pollak Foundation in 1921 for an essay that best treats the problem of unemployment. The Pollak Foundation was headed by the well known amateur economists, Foster and Catchings.

2 comments:

  1. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on technological unemployment.

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  2. Generally speaking I think it is underappreciated by economists as a source of short-run unemployment and overappreciated by laymen as a source of permanent unemployment. The only way we're ever going to have permanent unemployment is some sort of demand satiation, which I doubt is in the cards in any substantial sense.

    This is more of an intellectual/public opinion history of it. Technological unemployment was one of the major pop-economics justifications for the Great Depression - it still should be an interesting read, of course.

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