ABSTRACT
In 1945 William H. Beveridge published his book, Full Employment in a Free Society . He recognized full well that some unemployment is due to frictional, seasonal, and structural factors. He nonetheless found it relatively straightforward to state the employment goal of market-oriented economies: unemployment should be of short duration, there should, in general, be more jobs than people looking for them, and effective demand should be such that these objectives could be met (pp. 18–20). A healthy economy for Beveridge was one that, within the limits he delineated, would be naturally fully employed. Similarly Arthur F. Bums, writing in the early 1960s, recognized the same sort of definitional problems but had no difficulty stating the public policy goal as one of full employment in line with the Employment Act of 1946, then as now, our basic public policy statement on the subject of employment goals (Bums 1969, p. 186).
