Structural Unemployment Quotes

Labour parades compassion for the poor, but it practised casual cruelty by consigning millions to benefits. Yet there's nothing compassionate about being trapped on benefits, being robbed of the dignity of work, and shut out from the choices that brings.

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.

I think, my generation, it's hard to have hope when you got a $700-trillion derivatives debt to pay and a bubble about to explode and $500 trillion worth of GDP.

[It] is exactly what politicians want. They want you to feel and behave like children while they pretend to be the all-knowing benevolent father. While they rile you up about how immigrants are stealing your jobs, they distract you from enlightening facts, including the assessment of some experts that the influx of Latino immigrant workers of the past 25 years has had less effect on employment patterns than factories that moved abroad, the decline of labor unions and the recurring recessions. So while we’re told to focus on building a massive wall to keep out immigrants, the real causes of job loss and economic instability continue unabated.

My job was to teach the whole corpus of economic theory, but there were two subjects in which I was especially interested, namely, the economics of mass unemployment and international economics.

When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results.

My decision to leave applied mathematics for economics was in part tied to the widely-held popular belief in the 1960s that macroeconomics had made fundamental inroads into controlling business cycles and stopping dysfunctional unemployment and inflation.

While the effect of increased global trade is positive for economies as a whole, specific sectors get battered, and large swathed of unskilled workers find themselves unemployed or under employed.

Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.

After a major loss of dynamism in the 1960s, productivity growth rates began dropping in most countries, falling by half in the U.S. in the 1970s and more or less ceasing altogether in France, Germany and Britain in the late 1990s.

Certainly, 9 percent unemployment and very slow growth is not a good situation.

The introduction of machinery is turning into idleness thousands, faster than new industries are founded

There were a lot of manufacturing jobs lost over a long period of time and particularly after - during the Great Recession. We've had some recovery in manufacturing employment as the economy's recovered.

Back in the 1980s parts of our country were devastated by de-industrialisation. This wave of globalisation and the first fruits of technological innovation destroyed industrial jobs or exported them to low-wage economies. The loss of work had a devastating impact.

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

A while ago I did a story comparing the change in employment rates in recessions in the U.S. and in Europe, and what I found was that America fired a lot of people and rehired a lot of people faster than Europe. That difference is disappearing, and that is a problem.

The longer workers are unemployed, the greater the likelihood that their skills will erode and workers will lose attachment to the labor force, permanently damaging the economy's dynamism and potential output.

The economic development of industrial society tends inevitably to the ruin of small industries.

The problem is that we are trying to prepare people for the new economy using a higher education system built for the old economy. As a result, many high-skilled, high-paying industries suffer from a shortage of labor, while too many low-paying industries suffer from a surplus.

The stagflation of the 1970s blessed us with damaging wage and price controls and the utterly counterintuitive supply-side notion - famously drawn on a napkin - that cutting taxes would lead to higher tax revenues.

It was the unemployment that was the hardest to bear. The jobless millions were like an embolism in the nation's vital circulation; and while their indisputable existence argued more forcibly than any text that something was wrong with the system, the economists wrung their hands and racked their brains and called upon the spirit of Adam Smith, but could offer neither diagnosis or remedy.

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

Let me tell you the story about Massachusetts under Governor Romney. It did fall to 47th out of 50 in jobs creation. Wages went down when they were going up in the rest of the country. He left his successor with debt and a deficit, and manufacturing jobs left that state at twice the rate as the rest of the country.

We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don't care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it's the worst recovery since the Great Depression.

Trade is not the cause for unemployment. In fact, the biggest drivers for unemployment are innovation and increased productivity. It has nothing to do with trade.