The "Disappearance" of Involuntary Unemployment

Unemployment is one of the outcomes that individuals experience in the labor market. Economics is a discipline that usually seeks to explain individual outcomes as the result of the choices individuals make subject to the constraints they face. Some economic explanations of unemployment, have, therefore, chosen to view unemployment as arising from voluntary individual adjustments of labor supply, given wage rates-but others view unemployment as directly reflecting constraints on the quantity of labor that individuals can supply. Although economists may agree on the importance of "choice subject to constraint," they disagree on the fundamental question "Is the outcome of unemployment primarily to be explained by individual choices or by the quantity constraints to which those choices are subject?" The major theme of this essay is that the "mainstream" answer to this question has changed dramatically over the past few decades-as, indeed, labor economics as a subject area has changed. As P. J. McNulty and others have noted, mainstream labor economics has largely deserted its institutional roots and has become an area for applied micro-economic theorizing and sophisticated econometrics [McNulty 19801. Instead of inductive analysis based (at least partially) on primary