Daily Inspiration Quote by William Vickrey

Vickrey’s line is the polite academic version of a dare: if we’re still tolerating mass unemployment, it’s not because the cupboard is bare, it’s because the policy imagination is. The key phrase is “no reason inherent in the real resources available to us.” He’s stripping away the most common alibi - that “the economy” is a natural system with hard limits - and replacing it with a blunt accounting claim. We have labor, capital, technology, unmet needs; if those aren’t being matched up, the failure is institutional, not physical.

The time horizon matters too. “Rapidly” and “within the next two or three years” is designed to puncture the slow-drip fatalism that treats full employment as a distant, aspirational byproduct of growth. Vickrey is insisting it can be chosen, scheduled, engineered. That’s a radical stance in a culture where joblessness is often framed as the market’s necessary discipline, a regrettable but cleansing purge.

Calling it “genuine full employment” is also doing work. He’s not talking about statistical tricks or a labor market that looks “tight” only because people gave up looking. He’s pointing at the difference between a headline rate and a lived reality - the security to say no, the bargaining power that forces wages up, the social stability that follows when employment isn’t rationed.

Contextually, Vickrey sits in a mid-century Keynesian tradition that saw government as capable of managing demand and treating unemployment as a solvable design problem. The subtext is unmistakable: if we can’t do this, it’s because someone benefits from not doing it.