Eleutherian

My friend Kevin over at Questing for Atlantis asked with regard to this Campus Progress comic, "Can you guess what's wrong here?"

It’s the implicit suggestion that any level of unemployment is unacceptable.

The silliness of this idea is so plain on its face that I was hard pressed to believe the cartoon was serious and not a fun bit of satire on leftism taken ad absurdum. Except since it’s on Campus Progress I don’t think that’s too likely.

Anyhow, basic economics lesson. There are a lot of different kinds of unemployment.

• There’s frictional unemployment, people temporarily between jobs and looking for their next job.
• There’s structural unemployment, resulting from a mismatch between the skills sought by the labor demand and the skills possessed by the labor supply.
• There’s seasonal unemployment, a result of people working in industries that only operate at certain times of year. The people in Most Dangerous Catch are a good example.
• There’s classical unemployment stemming from wages set above a market-clearing level