Past and Prospective Causes of High Unemployment
回顾了二十年前发达国家低失业率的状况，分析了当前高失业率（尤其是欧洲的“欧洲硬化症”）的成因，并探讨了美国低失业率与不平等加剧之间的可能权衡。
Twenty years ago, on the eve of the first of the great post-Bretton-Woods recessions, unemployment did not appear to be a major problem for advanced economies. Among what would later be dubbed the G-7 nations, the United States had the highest unemployment rate at 5.5 percent; but very little of this unemployment was long-term, and the extent of short-term unemployment could be rationalized as the inevitable and even desirable result of a dynamic economy. Western Europe had an unemployment rate that, measured on a comparable basis, was only 3 percent. Japan's unemployment rate was a trivial 1.4 percent, a performance nearly matched by West Germany's 1.6 percent. Whatever their other economic and social problems, the world's industrial nations seemed to have left fears of mass unemployment far behind. Today, of course, unemployment is back with a vengeance. In Europe, in particular, the seemingly inexorable rise in the unemployment rate (Chart 1) has led to the creation of a new word: Eurosclerosis. The United States has not seen a comparable upward trend-indeed, the unemployment rate in 1989-90 was lower than in 1974, and the current recovery may already have pushed the unemployment rate into the same range (changes in the survey method, introduced this year, blur the picture slightly). However, many people on both sides of the Atlantic believe that the United States has achieved low unemployment by a sort of devil's bargain, whose price is soaring inequality and growing poverty. Paul Krugman