Cyclical unemployment is based on the assumption that demand for products, and the labor that produces them, fluctuates over time. When the business cycle is at its peak, there is low cyclical unemployment. When the cycle is in recession, unemployment is relatively high.
There is plenty of evidence that the pressure of demand rises and falls from year to year and that unemployment moves in sympathy with that cycle. For example, unemployment fell sharply following the boom in the late-1980s, rose again during the recession of the early-1990s, and is now falling again. This cyclical movement does seem to be related to the adequacy of demand in the economy as a whole, (Britton, 1994)
Yet when a country is involved in military conflicts on a regular basis, such as the United States has been in the last few decades, these conflicts must be taken into account as part of the cyclical change in demand. Due to large amounts of government spending, wartime generally represents a high point in the business cycle.
In war, of course, full employment had been achieved. Useful work was found for everyone as part of a national effort, even those who had been thought unemployable turned out to be good soldiers or munitions workers after all. (Britton, 1994)
Demand for goods is high during a war, as is the labor to produce them. The need for soldiers can be seen as an extra demand for jobs. Their absence from the standard economy may shrink the labor supply to the point that the price of labor increases
Once the war is over, however, the demand for goods by the government to support the war effort decreases dramatically. As soldiers come home, some displace workers who filled in for them, while other soldiers find themselves unemployed. Overall demand for labor decreases, and wages as a whole go down.
The long periods of high unemployment between the wars had been the cause of poverty of a kind we no longer know in this count
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