

Unemployment in the West

The quest for jobs

It is not impossible for politicians to reduce the West’s frighteningly high unemployment levels

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Readers' comments




In most developed countries, unemployment and soverign debt will get worse and worse until all casino capitaists are sent to Afghanistan. That will be the end of capitalism. Capitalism will face the same fate as communism.


Veronica, have you come here in a time machine from the 1960s?

We've been producing relatively fewer superfluous physical goods and more services and intellectual property for 4 or 5 decades now. We've been growing and adding jobs all the while.

The private sector is already moving to the new world, our government and our entitlements are stuck in the 20th century when labor inefficiency didn't matter b/c our biggest economic competitors would never sully themselves with jobs stolen from a capitalist empires. The manufacturing and related sectors are put out to pasture too quickly, and our society develops a balance of trade problem.

No offense, but that 20th century fairy tale needs to be put to bed. The economy is already changing, and it will continue to change on its own.


So goes housing so goes the country. Housing has led this nation out of every recovery since WWI. Housing is now worse off than during the Great Depression and is leading the US into a fiscal disaster because Congress, and it's leaders, fail to recognize the importance of a healthy home industry to the overall economy. Sadly, they even want to make it worse instead of better by toying with the idea of eliminating the mortgage deduction. If they do, welcome to Pottersville, USA and the slums of suburbia.


Employment is consequence of our economy, i.e. “the production and distribution of goods and services.” However, the amount of money, where the money is spend on, and the value of money have a direct affect on the amount of Human Resources & Energy in circulation, i.e. employment. For your information Google “The World Monetary Order”.

Richard Michael Abraham

For Many...Stop Looking for a Job - Start Business

Overall, there are no good jobs and none coming in the near future.

These are the times when every person needs to ask, "The economy is rotted out, maybe I should start my own business."

If you're waiting to get a $100,000 job again, wait no more. Start a business and be happy with $50,000 (or half your customary job income) your first year. If you fight now, you gain control for the rest of your life.

You can do it. Don't let the World economy beat you down further. Beat it. Start a small business doing something you like and where there's some demand for your skills.


Richard Michael Abraham
The REDI Foundation


again....it is ecomomically impossible for governments to create jobs [counting jobs destroyed or suppressed by taxation]

corporations do not pay taxes.....people pay taxes

corporations do not profit.....people profit [employees & shareholders]


One wonders:
Since 1960, labour productivity in the US, Japan and EU increased five times. This means we consume five times more since then: Bigger cars, bigger bellies, bigger houses, bigger holidays, bigger wardrobes, bigger infrastructure, etc. Now this is also happening in other parts of the world.
We saw that banks to allow this are pumping more money into the system with their solvency decreasing, governments borrowing from future to allow for this with their debt/gdp ratios increasing.
One wonders whether with labour productivity increasing, there will come a moment when the bellies, cars, etc. cant get bigger and we will need men that do not want to work.


I think, we must redesign the labour market. Nowadays we have the situation, the world has become more and more technical.

On my opinion the exponential increasing amount of information is one of the challenges. An answer could be an advanced matching technology. The only platform known to me is JANZZ. Search and offer profiles are intelligently synchronized and made available for use on the browser-based platform by means of Web 3.0 technology, also known as semantic Web. An ontology creates a network of logical relations from a series of data and also represents a multidimensional link between the data to be processed.

I suggest to develop JANZZ.

Jai Prakash Sharma

With 44 million unemployed in the OECD countries, out of whom more than 14 million in the US alone, the economic outlook of US and Europe does really appear gloomy, made more depressing by the wrongheaded policy pursuit by the western governments, causing not only economic contraction, but the spectre of double-dip recession, which wouldn't be reversed unless such serious policy course correction is effected as could combine growth and job inducing fiscal stimulus for short-term with medium to long-term fiscal reduction through well calibrated fiscal-monetary moves.

Fifth Horseman

You'd think the first thing the Coalition of Butchers would think about giving up on its downward spiral to insolvency would be its recreational wars but apparently everything else is on the table but that. Apparently some things are just sacred.



"Keynesian principles only work when a government runs a balanced budget or surplus budget during boom years."

was there an instance of this in history?

Keynesian principles never work because they are vodoo nonsense based on a a psychological motivatd mass conspiracy explanation 'animal spirits' of investors.

fact is, Labor is the ultimate scarce factor on this earth, in a free market economy, free of goverment intervention of the monetary fiscally stimulating and regulatory kind, Labor is, read my lips NEVER EVER unemployed.

Tall Will

How to create jobs?

Subsidies and infrastructure spending are false hopes. The Australian government tried both in the post-GFC panic period, and both measures were largely a failure. Its Building Education Revolution (BER) sought to do a 'quick' spend infrastructure on school buildings and wasted or misspent about $5 billion of the $15 billion total. In addition it gave $900 in cash to every adult in the country, to encourage confidence. Neither measure created many new jobs and a lot of small tradesmen went broke trying to play with the Big Boys.

Creating jobs is hard without falling prey to such chimera, or creating new distortions such as tariff barriers. Governments are not helpless though: they can immediately abolish all restrictions on the labour markets other than those that protect health & safety, e.g., closed-shops [union bargaining monopoly]; entry restrictions [licensing, such as by lawyers; dog-catchers; academics; and nearly every guild]; barriers to entry [capital restrictions; onerous laws, especially on hiring and firing, but also on business operating hours; hours worked, penalty rates, etc]. H&S also includes outlawing age; sex; and racial discrimination, as well as work-place bullying (all of which are "taxes" on efficiency and therefore on jobs).

Then, very severely restrict tort law 'hunting licences', which are in effect a tax on useful work. Then invest in skills re-training, by involving employers in deciding what skills to train for (after all, they know best what's required), including employer involvement - with government money - in educational skills training from literacy to IP to high-end blue-collar skills, and provide incentives to them to hire and hold such trainees for at least 18 months. High-end blue collar jobs are the hardest to send offshore, and have the biggest "multiplier".

Then, fix education: end the teachers' unions' monopoly on who is a teacher, and academics' monopoly on what is a university. Reform the curricula to meet the modern world. If academics think publishing more papers decides their rankings, let them, but most under-graduates just want to be equipped with some skills in how to think; and some training in how to solve problems in the real world. So if the academic wants tenure (an outdated notion anyway), he should be always required to teach under-graduates.


No, no, no. This article is all wrong.

The biggest reason for unemployment in the OECD countries is due to their education systems. All the OECD countries either have government monopolies or huge government funded interventions in their education markets.

As demand for skills has increased the OECD higher education systems have raised tuitions and fees while keeping quality the same or lowering it.

Until the OECD countries PRIVATISE AND DEREGULATE their education markets unemployment will not go down.

Gerd Dimmler

I want to be brief:

Why, Why did You endorse Obama.

I read the Economist for 40 years, since I have been a real adult.

After Obama's endorsement I cancelled a three Year extension of the subscription.

Again, to the editors of this once (for over 100 years) free market publication (very rare in this world)

Why did you endorse Obama?, Why?

Gerd (an American, formerly German)


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