One can scarcely imagine a more timely and thought-provoking volume than Stricker’s survey of American unemployment, its stubborn persistence, and its menacing prospects. When Stricker sent his book to press, he could not have foreseen that two months before its publication COVID-19 would trigger a massive surge of unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Yet this book seems to have anticipated the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, and Stricker’s scholarship prepares us well to understand one of the most pressing problems with which we will likely struggle as a result of the pandemic—persisting unemployment—by setting that problem in deep historical perspective.
The book is organized in two parts. Part I draws upon both history and economics to provide an overview of U.S. unemployment from the panic and depression of 1873 through 2018 and the Trump administration’s early years. That history is replete with the erroneous,...