Samantha Kessel

Economics Blog

This cartoon humorously depicts one of the largest issues currently in the United States. Unemployment is slightly less than two times the ideal rate, around five percent, and therefore is causing what many would consider to be an economic crisis. When people are unemployed they no longer have a steady income which greatly affects what and how much they will purchase which obviously causes some form of negative pressure on the economy as a whole.

In this cartoon we see two acrobats in the middle of what we can assume to be a performance for a crowd and one of the acrobats informs the other that they are going to be let go, what many of us know as being fired. In this specific example the performer is going to fall a great distance to the floor and be left suffering on his own. This relates to what happens in real life when people are fired only in a different way. If someone loses their job they can collect unemployment benefits for a particular amount of time, set by the government, however it is generally nowhere close to what they are used to making when they have a full time job. Because of this their lives tend to suffer if even slightly simply because they no longer have the funds to purchase things that they see necessary and in actuality many people must change their entire mindsets on spending as a whole.

This cartoon does not depict what we discussed earlier in the semester about unemployment and how there are different categories of unemployment. If this particular acrobat were polled by an economist they would actually not be described as unemployed because they had worked for pay at some point in the last month. However when the polls are taken for the next month, if they had not found any other source of employment, then they would then be considered unemployed. Also when the polls are taken the month after they lose their job they would have to be actively looking for work otherwise they would be considered as not in the labor force rather than unemployed so their number would not directly affect the reported unemployment rate.

Another factor that this cartoon does not show is that unemployment is actually a lagging indicator of the economy. Many companies will neither hire nor fire employees right away based on a slight economic increase or downfall. This image however illustrates a worker being released right at what appears to be a slight economic downfall. While this differs from real life it definitely portrays the idea of unemployment as something many people do not want to happen to them.

This cartoon greatly simplifies a huge problem in the United States however it turns unemployment into something that many people can relate to and easily understand. It does not consider many other factors in unemployment which is to be expected by a simple cartoon rather than a complete article by an economist on the countries current economic standing. It does not illustrate the fact that unemployment is a lagging indicator of economic standing however we can still see the undesired effects of being let go from a particular line of work.

http://offthemark.com/search-results/key/economic/ It is the fifth cartoon on the page with the two acrobats.