THE HUMAN COST FACTOR
Steinfelds, Peter
THE HUMAN COST FACTOR PETER STEMIFELS ON THE Saturday before Election " Day the Joint, Economic Committee released a jstedy suggesting, as the New York Itmes put it, that a substantial number of...
...It has long been argued that official unemployment statistics actually under-rep-resent the scope of the problem...
...Brenner's study, extrapolated by the Committee, measures the links between health, mortality and crime and an increase in unemployment from 3.5 to 4.9 percent...
...So the Joint Economic Committee might well have issued its study the day after elections...
...No matter which of our domestic problems we turn to, racial equality, violent crime, declining cities, welfare reform, higher taxes, there looms the issue of employment...
...In his book, Affirmative Discrimination, Nathan Glazer points to studies attributing high black unemployment rates neither to discrimination nor job shortage but to "poor endowment- education and family background...
...No doubt the Committee's timing was politically calculated...
...And, in turn, both the political and economic consequences of inflation make it impossible to achieve full employment or, once having achieved it, to keep it there...
...If full employment is to stand half a chance in the political arena, its advocates will have to address themselves to these issues: Unemployment and inflation...
...The situation, today, is worse...
...THE HUMAN COST FACTOR PETER STEMIFELS ON THE Saturday before Election " Day the Joint, Economic Committee released a jstedy suggesting, as the New York Itmes put it, that a substantial number of the deaths, suicides, and murders from 1970 to 1975 were traceable to an increase of 1.4 percentage points in unemploy ment in 1970...
...The human suffering involved can, finally be measured only by those powers of sympathy that one hopes are not yet totally atrophied in the audience the Committee was addressing...
...In fact, the unemployment rate has gone from 3.5 to 7.8 percent since 1970, once almost reaching 9 percent...
...And since we have grown skeptical about our capacity to affect skill, motivation and the rest, the only sound alternative is resignation-let nature take her course, it would have been said a century ago...
...But the study's author, Dr...
...Full employment ought to be the first issue on the national agenda no matter what the presidential administration...
...They do not include those who have dropped out of the job market altogether...
...Every time we push the rate of unemployment toward acceptably low levels, by whatever means, we set off a new inflation...
...The politically sophisticated smiled and passed on...
...You can't have less of one without more of the other...
...Translating these findings into dollars, as we are always wont to do, the Committee estimated that the cost of this lost income, hospitalization, and institutionalization was a $21 billion toss to American society...
...Twentieth-century economics, no less than its nineteenth-century predecessor, has its "iron laws...
...The job less rates in our inner cities are much higher...
...Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins, has been producing noteworthy findings on the relationship between unemployment and numerous physical and mental impairments for many years...
...For Keynesians one of these turns on the "Phillips curve," depicting an unavoidable trade-off between unemployment and inflation...
...For a long time, the way out of this dilemma was to insist that inflation wasn't as bad as the business leaders of this world insisted...
...And yet economists are telling the nation it must live with 6 to 7 percent unemployment for the rest of the decade...
...The obstacles are within the potential employees-lack of skills, discipline, motivation, and so on...
...For various reasons, some economic, some political, that will no longer wash...
...Brenner's findings, then, are only the tip of the iceberg...
...In 1965, Daniel Moynihan wrote, "The fundamental, overwhelming fact is that Negro un employment, with the exception of a few years . . . has continued at disaster levels for 35 years" (his emphasis...
...Even while liberal politicians, as in the Democratic primaries, appear to rally round full employment, the liberal economists who advise them are quietly backing away...
...those foi black teenagers may be over 50 percent...
...The importance of work in providing a sense of place in the world is a commonplace of social science-and, more important, of the ordinary citizen's understanding of things...
...The economic crises of regions like the Northeast or Appala-chia or the Northern cities are tied to losses in jobs...
...This study, like his others, used highly refined techniques to show what percentage of heart attacks, mental hospital admissions, imprisonments, homicides, suicides, and so on could be strictly correlated with the drop in employment rather than other economic or non-economic factors...
...An old argument which does not go away...
...Unemployment means less tax revenue, on the one hand, and more tax expenditures for unemployment compensation, welfare, and Medicaid, on the other-$16 billion lost to the federal government for each percentage point of unemployment...
...The speaker is Charles L. Schultze of the Brookings Institution, Official Liberal Economist par excellence...
...The problem is not unemployment but the unemployed...
...Those with a little more than merely political sophistication may have paused...
...The terrible effect of unemployment on family stability has been studied since the 1940s...
...The battle of the statistics...
...The obstacles to full employment, and especially employment among minority groups, cannot be overcome by generating jobs...
Vol. 103 • November 1976 • No. 24
