FACT AND FALLACY IN LABOUR MARKET ANALYSIS: A REPLY TO MR. LANDO*
| Date | 01 February 1970 |
| Published date | 01 February 1970 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1970.tb00490.x |
| Author | Charles C. Killingsworth |
FACT AND FALLACY
IN LABOUR MARKET ANALYSIS:
A
REPLY
TO
MR. LANDO*
CHARLES C.
KILLINGSWORTH
Mr. Mordechai
E.
Lando has devoted his entire ‘Comment’ to one
paragraph in my article,
‘
Full Employment and the New Economics
’,
which
ran
to
36
paragraphs. Despite this rather narrow concentration, Mr. Lando
has seriously misstated
my
argument in that one paragraph, and he has
supported his criticisms by misstatements of fact and errors
in
analysis.
Since his criticisms go to the heart of a thesis that
I
have developed
in
some detail during the past decade,
I
think that
I
should answer them
rather fully.
I
shall first dispose of some of the more obvious misstatements. Mr.
Lando writes that
I
identified the ‘lower half’ of the male labour force
in
the
US.
as the group
‘
with
no
high school education ’-that is, with
8
or
fewer years of schooling. My definition of the two halves of the male labour
force was stated as follows in the article (pp. 15-16)
:
For analytical purposes, we can divide the male labour force into
two parts; the median educational attainment of male workers is 12.2
years,
so
that those
with
less than 12 years of schooling are approxi-
mately the lower half and those with
12
years or more are approxi-
mately the upper half of the labour force.
By
misstating my argument, Mr. Lando eliminates from consideration
some
8.8
million members of the labour force group
of
22.1 million (in
1962) to which my generalizations related.
To
support his challenge to some
of my generalizations, he further narrows his attention to an even smaller
group-namely, men 25-54 years of age with
8
or fewer years of education.
This is a minor fraction of the
‘
lower half
’
that
I
discussed. This subgroup
numbered 7.9 million men in 1962,
or
about
35
per cent. of the
‘
lower half
’.
Mr. Lando attempts to support his charge of
‘
strained interpretations
’
of
the data by showing that some of my generalizations about a labour force
group of 221 million appear to be overstatements when applied to a small
+Editors’
Nore:
On receiving the Comment by Lando (published above) on
Professor Killingsworth’s earlier article in this Journal (February
1969)
the Editors
decided to publish it and invited Professor Killingsworth
to
reply to the criticisms.
In
answering
Mr.
Lando. Professor Killingsworth has taken the opportunity
to
reconsider in detail a number
of
points bearing
on
the presentation of his thesis as
expounded in the earlier article. Since we believe that this detailed treatment covers
new ground and clarifies some possible misconceptions, we have gladly provided
space for its inclusion in full.
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