T. Aldrich Finegan in Labor force growth and the return to full employment (at JSTOR) from Monthly Labor Review, February 1972, page 30. (Page 2 of 11 JSTOR pages):
"... it is well established that, other things equal, the labor force tends to be larger when (and where) labor market conditions are more favorable ..."
Alternatively, see Requirements for a Return to Full Employment, 1971-73 (PDF, typed, preliminary draft, text not selectable)
//
I thought I was done with this one. Nope. At JSTOR I just found The Great Labor Force Projection Debate: Implications for 1980 by Marc Rosenblum, from the Fall 1973 issue of The American Economist. Rosenblum writes:
... new projections being issued by the Labor Department for 1980 fail to reflect a major lesson learned from the great debate over 1970 forecasts: projection accuracy depends in part on the extent to which actual economic conditions during the target year match the projection's full-employment assumptions. Changes in labor force size are, to that extent, induced by changes in demand at given wage rates...
Only seven years ago Jacob Mincer wrote that the procyclical behavior of the labor supply had finally been accepted, after "three decades of research and occasionally animated controversy."
... The two main critics of the Labor Department's forecasts, Alfred Tella and Thomas Dernburg et al., both held (correctly, as it turns out) that Government figures would understate the 1970 labor force. Along with their reasoning both offered projections based on their own regression models, avoiding the supposed shortcomings of inflexibility to economic conditions they both found (independently) in the BLS forecasts...
And that's just on the first page.
//
In these articles from the early 1970s, references to "full employment" policy are glaringly obvious. You don't see that in recent thinking. So different!
1 comment:
See also: Surprised me
Post a Comment