Development
A classic statement regarding the natural rate appeared in Milton Friedman's 1968 Presidential Address to the American Economic Association :
- “At any moment of time, there is some level of unemployment which has the property that it is consistent with equilibrium in the structure of real wages … The ‘natural rate of unemployment’ … is the level that would be ground out by the Walrasian system of general equilibrium equations, provided there is embedded in them the actual structural characteristics of the labour and commodity markets, including market imperfections, stochastic variability in demands and supplies, the costs of gathering information about job vacancies, and labor availabilities, the costs of mobility, and so on.”
However, this remained a vision - Friedman never wrote down a model with all of these properties. When he illustrated the idea of the Natural Rate he simply used the standard text-book labor market demand and supply model that was essentially the same as Don Patinkin's model of the full employment. In this there is a competitive labor market with both labor supply and demand depend on the real wage and the natural rate is simply the competitive equilibrium where demand equals supply. Implicit in his vision is the notion that the Natural Rate is Unique: there is only one level of output and employment that is consistent with equilibrium.
Read more about this topic: Natural Rate Of Unemployment
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“I’ve always been impressed by the different paths babies take in their physical development on the way to walking. It’s rare to see a behavior that starts out with such wide natural variation, yet becomes so uniform after only a few months.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion.”
—John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)