ABSTRACT
In Unemployment: A Problem of Industry, published in 1909, William Beveridge had written confidently about his diagnosis of the causes of unemployment and the remedies, if not the complete cure, for it. Twenty-one years later in 1930, and on the eve of the abyss which he only faintly sensed, he gloomily admitted that
Unemployment in Britain since the war transcends in scale anything experienced in earlier years. Before the war the annual percentage of trade union members unemployed ranged from just under one to just over ten: the mean … from 1860 to 1914 is 4.5…. For the nine years from 1921 to 1929 the annual percentage unemployed in the insured population has ranged from a minimum of 9.7 in 1927 to a maximum of 16.9 in 1921, and has averaged 12. 1
