CHANGING CONCEPTS OF FULL EMPLOYMENT: DIVERGENT CONCEPTS, DIVERGENT GOALS

In recent decades, substantial unemployment once again became commonplace enough in most Western industrial nations to erase the optimism that pervaded the early post‐World War II era. That optimism was fueled by a belief that capitalism had solved the problem of unemployment. Full employment was believed to be a permanent feature of Western economies, just as in the 1930s, mass unemployment was often considered a permanent feature of capitalist economies.