Unemployment Successes: Definite success in reviving businesses and reducing unemployment. By 1941 unemployment reduced by 40% If more people have money then more people are spending which means businesses doing better and can provide more people jobs for people. Economic recovery. Country benefited; many roads, school, airports etc. built that are still in use today. Even though ‘Boondoogles’ going back to work gave people much needed morale boost. Failures: Not till WWII that unemployment ended completely. Some work schemes were temporary e.g. CCC Boondoggles – paid people to do worthless jobs. Jobs not necessarily provided for the unskilled. This meant many Blacks and Woman lost out and remained poor. SuccessFailure?or

Quotes “I’ve got 4 million people at work but for god’s sake don’t ask me what they’re doing!”. Harry Hopkins

Examples of Boondoggles CWA Boondoggles: Hired Researchers to research the history of the safety pin. Men to chase tumble weeds on windy days. People joked at the time saying WPA stood for ‘we piss around’. WPA Boondoggles: Workers catalogued 350 different ways to cook spinach.

Something extra It was FDR’s other policies which prevented jobless from finding real jobs in the first place. Wasteful spending by these jobs programmes = diversion of valuable resources for politically motivated and economically counter productive purposes. E.g. thief goes house to house robbing everyone in the neighbourhood, then goes to local shopping mall to spend the money it doesn’t mean that because his spending helped the shopkeepers at the mall he has provided a general economic benefit. When govt. pays people to catalogue ways of cooking spinach their tax supported pay cheque can’t be counted as a net increase because the wealth used to pay him is only diverted, not created.