"It was the phenomenon of industrial unemployment that shocked contemporaries most. 'Next to war,' remarked The Times in an editorial ten years after the nadir of the downturn, 'unemployment has been the most widespread, the most insidious, and the most corroding malady of our generation: it is the specific social disease of Western civilisation in our time.' As a percentage of the civilian labour force, unemployment in the United States rose from 3.2 per cent on the eve of the Depression to a peak of 25 per cent in 1933. It remained above 15 per cent for the remainder of the decade. In Germany, which used a somewhat different definition, unemployment exceeded 50 per cent of trade union members in 1932."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 192-193
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Unemployment
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Niall Ferguson
75 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Niall Ferguson →
Related Quotes
"Finally, although Anglophone economic and political liberalism remains the most alluring of the world’s cultures, it …"
"The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the ed…"
"Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of …"
"It is a point worth emphasizing that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign effect. According to t…"
"The empire that rules the world today is both more and less than its British begetter. It has a much bigger economy, …"
"The whole point about historians is that we are really communing with the dead. It's very restful – because you read.…"
"In 1940, under Churchill’s inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the tru…"
"Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism …"
"A country’s economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and…"
"The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has accelerated this huge shift, which e…"