ABSTRACT
In order to realise the relative importance of the economic causes which are directly responsible for “unemployment,” some deductions from our earlier analysis may be of service. The common notion of the “philanthropist” and the moralist who, wholly untrained in economic thought, thinks the only thorough treatment of this and other problems of poverty consists in the treatment of individual character, need not detain us long. The fallacy is one necessary to all individualist views of society. A depression of the staple trade in a town throws out of employment 10 per cent, of those who are normally employed. The charity organiser with his individual scrutiny sets to work, and a close investigation of each “case” discloses in most of this 10 per cent, some moral or economic defect: there is drink, laziness, inefficiency, or some other personal fault discernible in, or imputed to, most of these “unemployed.” Our “thorough” investigator, having, as he thinks, found a sufficient reason why each man should be unemployed, reaches the conelusion, that “unemployment” is due to individual causes. Such conclusion is, of course, wholly fallacious. Personal causes, no doubt, explain in a large measure who are the individuals that shall represent the 10 per cent, “unemployed”, but they are in no true sense even contributory causes of the “unemployment.” When economic causes lower the demand for labour, competition will tend to squeeze out of employment those individuals who, for reasons, sometimes moral, sometimes industrial, are less valuable workers than their fellows. If these individuals had not been morally or industrially defective they would have kept their work, but necessarily by pushing out other 10 per cent. Personal causes do not to any appreciable extent cause unemployment, but largely determine who shall be unemployed. The individualist-moralist is keen to detect the fallacy involved in supposing that poverty can be stopped by regarding it as a number of holes to be filled up by pouring in promiscuous charity. But he does not perceive that this analysis and treatment of “unemployment” involves a fallacy closely analogous to that which he has condemned.
