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Unemployment in Interwar Britain

In a recent article two American authors, Benjamin and Kochin (1979a), argide that Keynes was wrong in attributing much of the abnormally high unemployment of the interwar years to a deficiency of aggregate demand. They claim to have discovered "an alternative clue to the riddle of high unemployment in interwar Britain" and to be able to show that "the persistently high rate of unemployment in interwar Britain was due in large part not to deficient aggregate demand but to high unemployment insurance benefits relative to wages" (ibid., p. 474). "The army of the unemployed standing watch in Britain at the publication of the General Theory was largely a volunteer army" (ibid.). In making their case, Benjamin and Kochin present three sets of evidence. The first is a regression of unemployment on a measure of the benefits-to-wages ratio, the so-called replacement ratio, and on a measure of deviations of output from trend over the period 1920-38. The second set of evidence concerns the implication of the lower rate of unemployment among juveniles than among adults, and the third set consists of the inferences to be drawn from the differences in the rate of unemployment between single and married women, at different times. All the bodies of evidence are used to support the hypothesis of the existence of an association between the replacement ratio and the level of unemployment; but only the first, namely, the time-series regression, is used to establish the amount of unemployment to be explained in this way. That amount is seen to depend on the specific values of the coefficients on the replacement term and on the output term in the regression. Table 1 reports the data which are used by Benjamin and Kochin. The figures for output are for net national product (Q) as given by Feinstein (1972). For W, Benjamin and Kochin derive a figure for average weekly earnings from the data for annual wage and salaries