Daily Inspiration Quote by William Vickrey

Vickrey’s “genuine full employment” lands like a politely detonated bomb under the complacent way policymakers talk about joblessness. By anchoring full employment to vacancies rather than a comfortable “natural rate,” he flips the usual burden of adjustment. It’s not workers who should learn to live with unemployment; it’s institutions that should tolerate the heat of a labor market where employers compete, wages rise, and hiring standards loosen.

The tell is in “as currently measured.” Vickrey is flagging that the unemployment rate is a political artifact as much as a statistic: it misses discouraged workers, underemployment, and the people pushed into limbo by caregiving, illness, or bias. He’s also exposing how the headline number can be used as moral cover. If your preferred equilibrium requires 4-6 percent unemployment to keep inflation in check, you can present that as economic wisdom rather than a choice to keep millions on the sidelines.

Context matters: Vickrey, a Nobel-winning economist with an educator’s clarity, was writing against the mid-to-late 20th century drift toward accepting “non-accelerating inflation” unemployment as prudent policy. His 1-2 percent target reads radical only because the bar has been lowered. The subtext is bracing: a society that can reliably produce job openings can choose to produce dignity and bargaining power too, but it has to stop treating a pool of unemployed people as an anti-inflation tool.