Excerpt from The Third Winter of Unemployment: The Report of an Enquiry Undertaken in the Autumn of 1922
In the following pages are summarised the results of a study of the unemployment problem undertaken by us in August and September of the present year. Our group included persons of diverse economic experience and differing political opinions. In order to supplement the information given in official returns and to assist to a fuller realisation of what the present depression actually meant in the private and public life of the country, we instituted a series of inquiries into unemployment in nine selected localities. The reports of these seemed of such interest, that we decided to print them and to offer them to the public as a contribution to an understanding of the present emergency.
These local investigations were undertaken at short notice by seven different investigators independently. They had to guide them a questionnaire indicating the points on which information was sought, but time did not permit of their meeting to discuss methods or results, and the nine localities investigated were widely scattered and of very different industrial characteristics. The large measure of agreement, therefore, in the impressions they present is quite spontaneous and must be attributed to the similarity of conditions in the different localities. There are, of course, important differences, and the reports bring out the complexity of the social problem presented by unemployment; but they show the features in the situation common to the whole country, such as the abnormal extent of the depression and the effects of the relief measures that are national in their scope, and thus supplement the available official information.
It has not been thought necessary or desirable to print the local reports in full. Much that was contained in them could be more conveniently summarised in a statement covering the country as a whole; while some aspects of the problem could be treated satisfactorily only in such a statement. Enough of each report, however, has been given to preserve the completeness of the local picture, and in the aggregate the reports have been cut down by only a quarter. No sample collection of local reports could give a true measure of the extent of unemployment, or do more than illustrate the working of the various schemes for relieving it.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Third Winter of Unemployment (John Jacob Astor)