ABSTRACT
The predominance of monetarist thinking in recent years has been associated with a revival of the prewar view that the cure for unemployment lies in ‘the labour market’, rather than in strengthening the demand for goods and services. The phrase ‘the labour market’ often seems one of the economic profession's more unhappy pieces of jargon. It conjures up visions of people being auctioned like cattle, or of agricultural workers in the nineteenth century coming to the County Town for the Michaelmas hiring, and in doing so suggests that, if the price for their labour was right, everyone would get a job. But (…) the supply and demand for labour is different from that for anything else, in that the receipts from selling labour (i.e. wages and salaries) are a major component of the demand for it (or the goods that labour is needed to produce).
