Talk:Full employment
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That about Australia - you should be aware that commitments were actually made to a number of things at the same time, and only one was full employment. There didn't appear to be any conflict among the objectives at the time, but since then things like protecting the currency have worked out as higher priorities in practice. PML. 10:14, Jul 29, 2003 203.202.5.75
- The White Paper, Full Employment in Australia, was tabled in the House of Representatives in 1945 by itself, not so much as economic policy but as social policy. It wasn't totally altruistic however - Prime Minister John Curtin, Treasurer & Post-War Reconstruction Minister Chifley and Manpower Minister Dedman were also trying to pacify the trade union movement which was fearful of a tidal wave of returned servicemen "taking our jobs" and driving down wages (as happened after 1918). Nonetheless, it was a very successful full employment policy that lasted three decades, and is worthy of mention in this article. The international OPEC crisis and recurrent inflationary episodes in the 1970s re-focussed governments on "Fighting Inflation First", as Malcolm Fraser put it. An excellent rundown on the history of unemployment in Australia can be found in Work For All by John Langmore MP, published around 1993. --Humehwy 20:37, Jul 2, 2004 (UTC)
the current version of this article says that "The 20th century British economist John Maynard Keynes stated that an unemployment rate of 3% was full employment." Are you sure that Keynes did so? wasn't it William Beveridge? Jim 17:43, May 18, 2005 (UTC)
The mid part of this article reads like "Blah Blah Blah" to me. Wouldn't a definition of full employment be something like "Anyone who wants a job, has a job"? I know in places like Alberta, Canada, the number of job vacantcies exceeds the number of avaliable workers, while there are still people on welfare and homeless without jobs. I've read that 3% unemployment = my definition of "Anyone who wants a job, has a job." 206.116.184.155 (talk) 16:12, 15 March 2008 (UTC)
- By not taking vacancies into account, the analysis that the mentioned economists provided is very poor. The natural rate of unemployment is rather when unemployment and vacancies are in balance, i.e. neither employers nor workers have the power to change conditions in their favour because of one-sided rationing. In a simplified model: if U=V then wage inflation is zero. How high the percentage of unemployment is in that situation depends on how well the market clears. This is not fixed, but can be influenced by labour market policies. Guido den Broeder (talk) 21:21, 5 May 2008 (UTC)
