I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in that, you say? Has it anything to do with the war? Well, it feels as if it had. The feeling that you’ve got to be everlastingly fighting and hustling, that you’ll never get anything unless you grab it from somebody else, that there’s always somebody after your job, that next month or the month after they’ll be reducing staff and it’s you that’ll get the bird — that, I swear, didn’t exist in the old life before the war. George Orwell
About This Quote

John Maynard Keynes was speaking about the Great Depression (1929-1939) in which unemployment was at 25%, and the government launched programs like the New Deal (in 1933) to try to provide jobs for the unemployed. The idea that it’s possible to have no jobs but lots of people out there looking for them is also a very modern idea (and one that we’re likely to see more of during this recession).

Source: Coming Up For Air

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