The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1921-12-28


 foremost British economists. He has been Professor of Political Economy @t Cambridge University since 1908 he Tariff" Unemployment" "rhe Economy and Finance of the Var" and other notable volumes,
 in eocIal as in individual ills the first step in the search for remedy is to understand tho nature of the dis ease, Unemployment tz 9 E3o'aI na= ,aay of which we have had oated experience, The nraaant 5u..- ak is than any others of which there are statistical records: but 1t Is not differ snt from others h egsentiei eharae= sen EspeFiedee of the past and ana alysis undertaken in the past are, therefore, relevant to pFesent diagn= aoaiB, In this article | shall ask two aueauons. Tha fiPBt ia a general enc; While. us everybody knows. an ener= peermanenti} unsatisfied, how is it that, from dme to time. in all eeun- tries of tho world, great number of men are thrown into involuntary idle ners7 The second question isi In what way !s the abnormal volume of unemployment that exists now, as compared wlsh other peFaeds of de- pression to be accounted f6r9
 The industrial population of this 2nd every other country is divided in to a number of groups of people, each group containing in various pro portions employers, providers of and each engaged in some branch of productive act v. The members of each group consume, of course, some part of their output themselves, but, In the main, they exchange it against tho output of the remaining groups or of corresponding groups outside the country, The size of the different gro is determined by the tendency aF 90, tR1H za GiStTihIlfa 5hafv paT0ita and their mental and manual capaci- ties ameng different occupations that no one of these is obviously more ad- vantageaus than another to a man everything were working smoothly in q ''stationery'' state. every group would have exactly as much work to do as 1t wanted to have, and would that work, exactly the amount of other peoples products that it had reckoned to obtain when 1t began its own work. The actual world, how and, consequently. these ideal oondi- tfon3 do not prevail.
 Why Demand SlaclIens.
 On occasion the output of one of of the groups outside which trade with the country, fails off in conse- quence of bad harvests. war, labor troubles. or some other cause, When 1 not offer so much of it's product as before in exchange for the products of the other groups. Again, it will not offer so much. if, in the recent past, it has for any reason purchased exceptionally large stocks of the products of other groups and so does not, for the time being, need any n ore of them, In circumstances Of this kind the real demand for the products falls off and, in general therefore, they do not care to work so hard or produce So much of thelI own product as before,
 These fluctuations are made larger than they would otherwise be, be- cause in modern industry many pro- cesses of production take long time and so each group has to adjust its action, not so much to actuGl req demands from other groups as tt forecasts of their real demands. The way is thus opened up fer error When there is an actual increase, oi crease, in the real demand for itt stuff, an industrial gFeup warmed 1T l the rising sun of prosperity, often i'm agihes that the outlook is better thar 1 it really is. This sort 0f error is in fe.ctious. Each of the groups sev ] orally becomes unduly optimistic about the future real demand of the 1 others collectively, Each expects tG get, say, twice as much of other peo pIe's stuff as before if it provides hall as much again of it's ownt and it de cides that this is worth while. WheI