Journal of Political Economy Vol. 21 No. 5 1913
Subsidized Unemployment Insurance
Abstract
Granted that unemployment insurance is necessary, is it possible? For many years this question was asked by most authoritative students of the subject, and the answer was not always favorable. Various experiments were made by municipalities and voluntary organizations in different countries, and some of them suffered a dismal failure. The establishment of a national compulsory unemployment insurance system in Great Britain through the National Insurance Act of I9II seems to settle the abstract question of possibility. Surely that which exists is possible, aside from the degree of success it may have or failure it may suffer. But the very fact of this prolonged iscussion, through almost two decades, of the general timidity in making experiments, inthe face of the rapid development of other forms of social insurance, and of the failure of several of these experiments-though the word "failure" could not be applied to any other steps in this field of social legislation-is evidence that there are special difficulties in the path of unemployment insurance which are not met with in the case of accidents or disease. In what do these difficulties consist? It is the theory of insurance science that any risk may be insured provided there is any regularity at all about its occurrence. It is the pride of that famous English insurance institution, Lloyds, that it offers to insure against any risk, even of an unusual kind, which does not seem to manifest any regularity. Unemployment is a risk. It demonstrates a fair degree of regularity both in its dependence upon trade and in its time fluctuations, whether in annual or longer cycles. When the whole problem was investigated very thoroughly by the Imperial Statistical Office of Germany, in I906, the conclusion was reached that there were no insurmountable t chnical obstacles for the development of an unemployment insurance system. The real difficulty was stated to be the absence of a simple test of unemployment. With comparatively few exceptions, the presence or absence of an accidental injury may be easily determined. It is
- DOI
- 10.1086/252245
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 412-431
- Language
- en
- Sources
- semanticscholar openalex crossref