IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cep/cepops/06.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Incurable Unemployment: A Progressive Disease of Modern Societies?

Author

Listed:
  • Ron Dore

Abstract

"It is widely acknowledged that the contemporary unemployment problem is very largely a problem of unemployed unskilled workers. This paper argues a. that high levels of unemployment and increasing dispersion in the primary labour income distribution are intimately related; b. that both reflect the impact of the accumulation of technology on the job structure; c. skill shortages are to be explained in increasing part by limits to the available stock of learning ability as well as to inefficiencies in training institutions; d. a sizable quantum of existing unemployment arises because the market clearing wage for people of low learning ability falls below either a statutory minimum wage or the reverse wage as set by the social security minimum; e. adequate discussion of these hypotheses is inhibited by a variety of taboos. Going from analysis to prescription, the paper argues that the more serious social problem is not unemployment per se, but the increasing inequality of condition of which it is a symptom. It seems particularly important to stress this, given that about the only cure for unemployment on offer seems to be greater ""flexibility"" - reduction of worker-protection ""rigidities"" - which would increase inequality; making the cure worse than the disease. Seemingly utopian long-run cures are considered, primarily moving towards a reasonably adequate universal citizen's income. This so redefines the rights and duties of citizenship that the necessary redistribution is seen not as taking from the able and industrious to give to the feckless, but as taking from the gifted lucky ones who can get satisfying work, in order to give both to the unlucky ones who cannot work and to those who could work - but who choose to do other things."

Suggested Citation

  • Ron Dore, 1994. "Incurable Unemployment: A Progressive Disease of Modern Societies?," CEP Occasional Papers 06, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
  • Handle: RePEc:cep:cepops:06
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/occasional/OP006.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John Adams & Malcolm Greig & Ronald W. McQuaid, 2002. "Mismatch in Local Labour Markets in Central Scotland: The Neglected Role of Demand," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 39(8), pages 1399-1416, July.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cep:cepops:06. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/_new/publications/occasional-papers/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.