ABSTRACT
Mass unemployment makes training schemes futile, increases the cost of benefits, and reduces the size of the national income from which the cost of benefits must be met. Whether unemployment will return after the war will depend more than anything else on Government policy. Beveridge and the Government both allow for an average of just over 1,500,000 workers unemployed over good years and bad—about two-thirds of the pre-war average. Beveridge also assumed that it would be “a rare thing” for any particular individual to be continuously out of work for more than 26 weeks; the Government, apparently, assumed that 4 people out of 5 would be back at work (or training for work) within 30 weeks. Following the Beveridge plan closely, the Government put the lion’s share of the extra cost on the personal insurance contributions. Beveridge described this arrangement as, “from the point of view of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, extremely cautious.
