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:
“The American has dwindled into an Odd Fellow—one who may be known by the development of his organ of gregariousness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... work is only part of a man’s life; play, family, church, individual and group contacts, educational opportunities, the intelligent exercise of citizenship, all play a part in a well-rounded life. Workers are men and women with potentialities for mental and spiritual development as well as for physical health. We are paying the price today of having too long sidestepped all that this means to the mental, moral, and spiritual health of our nation.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Good schools are schools for the development of the whole child. They seek to help children develop to their maximum their social powers and their intellectual powers, their emotional capacities, their physical powers.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)