ABSTRACT

One of the results of a society based on division of labour and exchange is the phenomenon of unemployment. The peasant may lack food even to the point of starvation, but he will not lack work. If in need of food every member of the community will help to perform the necessary task to obtain it, however small the return. Only those who have watched a peasant and his family labouring to collect a miserable load of hay from a bleak mountain side can realize for how small a return such persons will toil long hours. In our society, considered as a whole, there is no lack of work to be done. On every hand there are tasks waiting to be performed, the accomplishment of which would add to the well being of the communityhouses, hospitals, roads needing to be built, sick people needing to be tended, children to be better taught; there is in fact an infinite amount of work to be done. If we, like the members of the peasant society, were all able and willing to do any kind of work required in our society for however small a return, there would be no unemployment. But in our complex society we are all more or less specialists, only able to do one or perhaps two or three different kinds of work and we are, moreover, only willing to do that work at a particular price. It is quite easy to see that at that price there may be more people willing to do a particular kind of work than there are persons desirous of employing them. It the price could be lowered the amount of employment would normally increase. If charwomen were charging 8d. an hour many persons would do more of their own work or manage with less elaborate

ECONOMICS FOR BEGINNERS

domestic arrangements than if the charge were 4d. per hour. We are assuming here that the work is of equal quality in the two cases. It is a fallacy to suppose that there is a definite “ lump of work ” of every particular kind, and that the only problem is to share that lump equitably among the workers. The demand for com­ modities and services, and therefore for the labour which produces them, varies with the price at which they are offered.