Sometimes people think they are engaged in a debate with one another when they really aren't.
This can happen because they define their terms differently. For example: is "Lake Superior" a lake or a sea? If we define a "sea" as a body of salt water, then Lake Superior is not a sea, because it is not salt. But if we define a sea as a body of water over a certain size, then Lake Superior would probably qualify, since it is bigger than many bodies of water called "seas." Now think through the following conversation:
Brown: Lake Superior is really a sea, because it is so huge.
Green: It's not a sea, because it's not salt.
It looks as if Green has contradicted Brown. But since they define "sea" differently, he hasn't really. We can see that if we use different words for the two definitions, so that sea1 means "body of salt water" and sea2 means "very large body of water." Then the conversation goes like this:
Brown: Lake Superior is really a sea1, because it is so huge.
Green: It's not a sea2, because it's not salt.
So there is really no contradiction at all.
The debates about unemployment in economics, in recent decades, have been a bit like that. Different "schools of thought" have often defined unemployment in different ways, and then argued as if they were talking about the same thing. And, from one point of view, they were. After all, there are real people, without jobs, to whom the definitions are supposed to refer. The common objective of the Reasonable Dialog on unemployment is to understand that fact and its causes and effects. It may be that one definition "works better" than another, for that purpose. But "works better" is itself a matter of personal judgment. Reasonable people might differ in their judgment of which works better, and disagree about the reasons for their judgments. To a considerable degree, that is what the controversy is about.
But what are these conflicting views? And is there really any contradiction between them?
The Problem of Unemployment
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