The mean duration of unemployment has approximately doubled in the U.S. between the early 1950s and the mid-1990s, with most of the increase occurring since the early 1970s. We first construct a simple model linking the average duration of unemployment with the speed of technical change. Using...

Neither neoclassical nor Keynesian economics displays much patience with the popular notion that technical progress of the labor-saving variety tends to swell the ranks of the unemployed. Those who believe that market forces tend automatically to bring the economy back, if not to "full...