Do Young People Choose to be Unemployed?

link here to article


This is another good post today from Mark Thoma. It has a good relationship to the post below on establishing countervailing power in the US. The University of Chicago's economic department has a lot of bright people who serve a common purpose. Their common purpose is to reinforce the micro economic ideas of 19th century England that have been used to show that government cannot effectively moderate the business cycle. They have specifically directed their attack against the ideas of Keynes who argued that full employment depended upon adequate demand, and that government could take actions to stimulate demand and attain full employment during a recession.

Casey Mulligan is one of the many prominent Chicago economists who have attempted to make the case against Keynes and government intervention in the economy. He recently wrote that young people are unemployed because they choose not to work. This is one of the common themes among conservative economists. They use many arguments to place the blame on labor and not on the availability of jobs. Mulligans data in support of his argument is presented and attacked in this article. There are numerous Casey Mulligans in economic departments, and in conservative think tanks for good reason. They make the case for the groups that provide the funding and determine what articles get published in the right journals on the path to tenure. One of the goals of progressives should be to put all of the conservative myths together, along with the evidence against them, in order to provide the antidote to the poison that they distribute. We seem to be in the position of putting out the multiple doses of poison that pollute the environment instead of attacking the source of the poison. It all comes from the same well of laissez faire economic dogma.