Understanding Macroeconomics [antikvár]

1 Introduction Powerful forces range over the American economy today. Technological advances of startling impact, swift changes in population, new climates of affluence, newly rediscovered realities of poverty—all have become part of our accustomed headline fare, part of the background of our daily lives. Perhaps more noticeable than any of these is a phenomenon still remembered by the generation of the middle-aged, but ignored until a few years ago by the generation of the young—a sucking undertow of unemployment. For the last half-decade the problem of finding a job—or worse, of not finding a job—has been the major worry of over four million Americans. Thus it is hardly surprising that the condition of, and the prospects for, the American economy have become subjects for concerned discussion and debate, not only in political life but in the home and on the campus. At the center of the discussion is a recently minted but already familiar word: automation. Anyone who has gone into a modern factory and has seen the extraordinarily sensitive, dexterous, and powerful equipment by which production is now facilitated must have asked himself what effect these new machines— 1