There is no doubt that Beveridge saw idleness as the curse of unemployment that had afflicted so many in the 1930s. The cure to idleness was work, and Beveridge believed that the state should make sure work was available for all who wanted it.
Idleness has been a fact of life for far too many for far too long in the UK, and as is clear the matter has got worse in the current recession. At a macroeconomic level, involuntary idleness represents a massive waste of economic resources for this country.
In this paper the authors seek to show that the policy of austerity that has increased idleness, and which has now given rise to the additional problem of disguised underemployment, makes no economic sense. Now that we know that in the current state of the economy, spending on investment by the government does, at the very least, pay for itself in the short term whilst in the longer term it can generate the revenues needed to deliver deficit reduction.