The Patient Feels Fine

Despite labor pains, strikes and the travail of reconversion, the U.S. is already close to full employment in peacetime--months faster than anyone expected. This encouraging announcement was made by the Committee for Economic Development last week.

CED Chairman Paul Hoffman totted up CED's cheery figures: 1) 52,000,000 workers already employed in civilian jobs; 2) steadily rising earnings, only slightly below the wartime peak; 3) production of civilian goods up from 50% to 75% since July.

CED had not expected the U.S. to achieve full employment, which it places at 53,500,000 jobs, till next September. Right now, said CED, the nation still has 2,000,000 unemployed, but there are still "hundreds of thousands of jobs" available. And the jobless are no more than the "frictional" or "floating" unemployment of from 1,500,000 to 2,500,000 which CED feels the U.S. will have even with full employment.

Some of CED's conclusions were open to argument; union labor would not agree that its earnings are only "slightly below" the war's peak. But few would quarrel with Chairman Hoffman's conclusion that the problem is no longer how to achieve full employment. The question now is: how can it be maintained?

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