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• Human Action: a Treatise On Economics, Vol. 2: Part 4: Catallactics Or Economics of the Market Society
• Chapter 14: The Scope and Method of Catallactics
• 1: The Delimitation of Catallactic Problems
• The Denial of Economics
• 2: The Method of Imaginary Constructions
• 3: The Pure Market Economy
• The Maximization of Profits
• 4: The Autistic Economy
• 5: The State of Rest and the Evenly Rotating Economy
• 6: The Stationary Economy
• 7: The Integration of Catallactic Functions
• The Entrepreneurial Function In the Stationary Economy
• Chapter 15: The Market
• 1: The Characteristics of the Market Economy
• 2: Capital Goods and Capital
• 3: Capitalism
• 4: The Sovereignty of the Consumers
• The Metaphorical Employment of the Terminology of Political Rule
• 5: Competition
• 6: Freedom
• 7: Inequality of Wealth and Income
• 8: Entrepreneurial Profit and Loss
• 9: Entrepreneurial Profits and Losses In a Progressing Economy
• The Moral Condemnation of Profit
• Some Observations On the Underconsumption Bogey and On the Purchasing Power Argument
• 10: Promoters, Managers, Technicians, and Bureaucrats
• 11: The Selective Process
• 12: The Individual and the Market
• 13: Business Propaganda
• 14: The “volkswirtschaft”
• Chapter 16: Prices
• 1: The Pricing Process
• 2: Valuation and Appraisement
• 3: The Prices of the Goods of Higher Orders
• A Limitation On the Pricing of Factors of Production
• 4: Cost Accounting
• 5: Logical Catallactics Versus Mathematical Catallactics
• 6: Monopoly Prices
• The Mathematical Treatment of the Theory of Monopoly Prices
• 7: Good Will
• 8: Monopoly of Demand
• 9: Consumption As Affected By Monopoly Prices
• 10: Price Discrimination On the Part of the Seller
• 11: Price Discrimination On the Part of the Buyer
• 12: The Connexity of Prices
• 13: Prices and Income
• 14: Prices and Production
• 15: The Chimera of Nonmarket Prices
• Chapter 17: Indirect Exchange
• 1: Media of Exchange and Money
• 2: Observations On Some Widespread Errors
• 3: Demand For Money and Supply of Money
• The Epistemological Import of Carl Menger’s Theory of the Origin of Money
• 4: The Determination of the Purchasing Power of Money
• 5: The Problem of Hume and Mill and the Driving Force of Money
• 6: Cash-induced and Goods-induced Changes In Purchasing Power
• Inflation and Deflation; Inflationism and Deflationism
• 7: Monetary Calculation and Changes In Purchasing Power
• 8: The Anticipation of Expected Changes In Purchasing Power
• 9: The Specific Value of Money
• 10: The Import of the Money Relation
• 11: The Money-substitutes
• 12: The Limitation On the Issuance of Fiduciary Media
• Observations On the Discussions Concerning Free Banking
• 13: The Size and Composition of Cash Holdings
• 14: Balances of Payments
• 15: Interlocal Exchange Rates
• 16: Interest Rates and the Money Relation
• 17: Secondary Media of Exchange
• 18: The Inflationist View of History
• 19: The Gold Standard
• International Monetary Cooperation
• Chapter 18: Action In the Passing of Time
• 1: Perspective In the Valuation of Time Periods
• 2: Time Preference As an Essential Requisite of Action
• Observations On the Evolution of the Time-preference Theory
• 3: Capital Goods
• 4: Period of Production, Waiting Time, and Period of Provision
• Prolongation of the Period of Provision Beyond the Expected Duration of the Actor’s Life
• Some Applications of the Time-preference Theory
• 5: The Convertibility of Capital Goods
• 6: The Influence of the Past Upon Action
• 7: Accumulation, Maintenance and Consumption of Capital
• 8: The Mobility of the Investor
• 9: Money and Capital; Saving and Investment
• Chapter 19: Interest
• 1: The Phenomenon of Interest
• 2: Originary Interest
• 3: The Height of Interest Rates
• 4: Originary Interest In the Changing Economy
• 5: The Computation of Interest
• Chapter 20: Interest, Credit Expansion, and the Trade Cycle
• 1: The Problems
• 2: The Entrepreneurial Component In the Gross Market Rate of Interest
• 3: The Price Premium As a Component of the Gross Market Rate of Interest
• 4: The Loan Market
• 5: The Effects of Changes In the Money Relation Upon Originary Interest
• 6: The Gross Market Rate of Interest As Affected By Inflation and Credit Expansion
• The Alleged Absence of Depressions Under Totalitarian Management
• 7: The Gross Market Rate of Interest As Affected By Deflation and Credit Contraction
• The Difference Between Credit Expansion and Simple Inflation
• 8: The Monetary Or Circulation Credit Theory of the Trade Cycle
• 9: The Market Economy As Affected By the Recurrence of the Trade Cycle
• The Role Played By Unemployed Factors of Production In the First Stages of a Boom
• The Fallacies of the Nonmonetary Explanations of the Trade Cycle
• Chapter 21: Work and Wages
• 1: Introversive Labor and Extroversive Labor
• 2: Joy and Tedium of Labor
• 3: Wages
• 4: Catallactic Unemployment
• 5: Gross Wage Rates and Net Wage Rates
• 6: Wages and Subsistence
• A Comparison Between the Historical Explanation of Wage Rates and the Regression Theorem
• 7: The Supply of Labor As Affected By the Disutility of Labor
• Remarks About the Popular Interpretation of the “industrial Revolution”
• 8: Wage Rates As Affected By the Vicissitudes of the Market
• 9: The Labor Market
• The Work of Animals and of Slaves
• Chapter 22: The Nonhuman Original Factors of Production
• 1: General Observations Concerning the Theory of Rent
• 2: The Time Factor In Land Utilization
• 3: The Submarginal Land
• 4: The Land As Standing Room
• 5: The Prices of Land
• The Myth of the Soil
• Chapter 23: The Data of the Market
• 1: The Theory and the Data
• 2: The Role of Power
• 3: The Historical Role of War and Conquest
• 4: Real Man As a Datum
• 5: The Period of Adjustment
• 6: The Limits of Property Rights and the Problems of External Costs and External Economies
• The External Economies of Intellectual Creation
• Privileges and Quasi-privileges
• Chapter 24: Harmony and Conflict of Interests
• 1: The Ultimate Source of Profit and Loss On the Market
• 2: The Limitation of Offspring
• 3: The Harmony of the “rightly Understood” Interests
• 4: Private Property
• 5: The Conflicts of Our Age

4

Catallactic Unemployment

If a job-seeker cannot obtain the position he prefers, he must look for another kind of job. If he cannot find an employer ready to pay him as much as he would like to earn, he must abate his pretensions. If he refuses, he will not get any job. He remains unemployed.

What causes unemployment is the fact that—contrary to the abovementioned doctrine of the worker’s inability to wait—those eager to earn wages can and do wait. A job-seeker who does not want to wait will always get a job in the unhampered market economy in which there is always unused capacity of natural resources and very often also unused capacity of produced factors of production. It is only necessary for him either to reduce the amount of pay he is asking for or to alter his occupation or his place of work.

There were and still are people who work only for some time and then live for another period from the savings they have accumulated by working. In countries in which the cultural state of the masses is low, it is often difficult to recruit workers who are ready to stay on the job. The average man there is so callous and inert that he knows of no other use for his earnings than to buy some leisure time. He works only in order to remain unemployed for some time.

It is different in the civilized countries. Here the worker looks upon unemployment as an evil. He would like to avoid it provided the sacrifice required is not too grievous. He chooses between employment and unemployment in the same way in which he proceeds in all other actions and choices: he weighs the pros and cons. If he chooses unemployment, this unemployment is a market phenomenon whose nature is not different from other market phenomena as they appear in a changing market economy. We may call this kind of unemployment market-generated or catallactic unemployment.

The various considerations which may induce a man to decide for unemployment can be classified in this way:

• 1. The individual believes that he will find at a later date a remunerative job in his dwelling place and in an occupation which he likes better and for which he has been trained. He seeks to avoid the expenditure and other disadvantages involved in shifting from one occupation to another and from one geographical point to another. There may be special conditions increasing these costs. A worker who owns a homestead is more firmly linked with the place of his residence than people living in rented apartments. A married woman is less mobile than an unmarried girl. Then there are occupations which impair the worker’s ability to resume his previous job at a later date. A watchmaker who works for some time as a lumberman may lose the dexterity required for his previous job. In all these cases the individual chooses temporary unemployment because he believes that this choice pays better in the long run.
• 2. There are occupations the demand for which is subject to considerable seasonal variations. In some months of the year the demand is very intense, in other months it dwindles or disappears altogether. The structure of wage rates discounts these seasonal fluctuations. The branches of industry subject to them can compete on the labor market only if the wages they pay in the good season are high enough to indemnify the wage earners for the disadvantages resulting from the seasonal irregularity in demand. Then many of the workers, having saved a part of their ample earnings in the good season, remain unemployed in the bad season.
• 3. The individual chooses temporary unemployment for considerations which in popular speech are called noneconomic or even irrational. He does not take jobs which are incompatible with his religious, moral, and political convictions. He shuns occupations the exercise of which would impair his social prestige. He lets himself be guided by traditional standards of what is proper for a gentleman and what is unworthy. He does not want to lose face or caste.

Unemployment in the unhampered market is always voluntary. In the eyes of the unemployed man, unemployment is the minor of two evils between which he has to choose. The structure of the market may sometimes cause wage rates to drop. But, on the unhampered market, there is always for each type of labor a rate at which all those eager to work can get a job. The final wage rate is that rate at which all job-seekers get jobs and all employers get as many workers as they want to hire. Its height is determined by the marginal productivity of each type of work.

Wage rate fluctuations are the device by means of which the sovereignty of the consumers manifests itself on the labor market. They are the measure adopted for the allocation of labor to the various branches of production. They penalize disobedience by cutting wage rates in the comparatively overmanned branches and recompense obedience by raising wage rates in the comparatively undermanned branches. They thus submit the individual to a harsh social pressure. It is obvious that they indirectly limit the individual’s freedom to choose his occupation. But this pressure is not rigid. It leaves to the individual a margin in the limits of which he can choose between what suits him better and what less. Within this orbit he is free to act of his own accord. This amount of freedom is the maximum of freedom that an individual can enjoy in the framework of the social division of labor, and this amount of pressure is the minimum of pressure that is indispensable for the preservation of the system of social cooperation. There is only one alternative left to the catallactic pressure exercised by the wages system: the assignment of occupations and jobs to each individual by the peremptory decrees of an authority, a central board planning all production activities. This is tantamount to the suppression of all freedom.

It is true that under the wages system the individual is not free to choose permanent unemployment. But no other imaginable social system could grant him a right to unlimited leisure. That man cannot avoid submitting to the disutility of labor is not an outgrowth of any social institution. It is an inescapable natural condition of human life and conduct.

It is not expedient to call catallactic unemployment in a metaphor borrowed from mechanics, frictional unemployment. In the imaginary construction of the evenly rotating economy there is no unemployment because we have based this construction on such an assumption. Unemployment is a phenomenon of a changing economy. The fact that a worker discharged on account of changes occurring in the arrangement of production processes does not instantly take advantage of every opportunity to get another job but waits for a more propitious opportunity is not a consequence of the tardiness of the adjustment to the change in conditions, but is one of the factors slowing down the pace of this adjustment. It is not an automatic reaction to the changes which have occurred, independent of the will and the choices of the job-seekers concerned, but the effect of their intentional actions. It is speculative, not frictional.

Catallactic unemployment must not be confused with institutional unemployment. Institutional unemployment is not the outcome of the decisions of the individual job-seekers. It is the effect of interference with the market phenomena intent upon enforcing by coercion and compulsion wage rates higher than those the unhampered market would have determined. The treatment of institutional unemployment belongs to the analysis of the problems of interventionism.