§ 20. #Reducing cyclical unemployment and its effects.# The maladjustments due to the movement of the business cycle are even more difficult to remedy completely, but are diminished by every measure that helps to reduce the great financial fluctuations.[14] Further, many communities have already begun to plan large public works more systematically so that they may be carried on mainly when private business is more slack. A comparatively small amount of such work would serve as a gyroscope to preserve the balance of employment for a large part of the less skilled workers. It has been estimated by Bowley, an English statistician, that in the United Kingdom, it would be necessary to set aside only 3 per cent of the annual expenditure for public works to be used additionally in years of industrial depression, in order to balance the wage loss at such times. This is a well-nigh incredibly small proportion, hardly as great as that of the weight of the gyroscope compared with the car or ship to which it is applied. It is hardly to be doubted that hitherto, in America, public undertakings have been executed much more largely in periods of business prosperity, and have been diminished during "hard times," thus greatly accentuating the harmful swing of the labor-demand. Finally, unemployment insurance, which has already been applied by parliamentary legislation in Great Britain to a group of nearly 3,000,000 wage-workers, is an indispensable and highly hopeful measure of relief. The place of this in a general system of industrial insurance will be indicated in the next chapter. [Footnote 1: See above, ch. 20, sec. 1.] [Footnote 2: See ch. 23, secs. 5-7, on the old law of employer's liability.] [Footnote 3: See Vol. I, pp. 292-293.] [Footnote 4: See Vol. I, p. 304.] [Footnote 5: See Vol. I, pp. 293 and 303.] [Footnote 6: See above, ch. 12, sec. 2.] [Footnote 7: Great importance should not be attached to these figures for they contain errors resulting from the inexact notions of inexperienced enumerators as to what constitutes unemployment, and from the inclusion of all persons gainfully employed, whether self-employed or in professional, salaried, or wage-earning positions.] [Footnote 8: See Vol. I, p. 207, on irregularity of employment as influencing wages, psychic income, and choice of employment.] [Footnote 9: On static, see Vol. I, ch. 32; on the scarcity of labor, see Vol. I, ch. 18, sec. 2 and references there; on value of services and wages see Vol. I, ch. 18, especially sec. 3, and ch. 19, especially sec. 7.] [Footnote 10: See above, ch. 21, sec. 9 on the minimum wage.] [Footnote 11: See Vol. I, p. 223, on friction in the adjustment of wages.] [Footnote 12: See above, ch. 10, secs. 6 and 7, on the industrial crisis.] [Footnote 13: See Bulletin of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, No. 159 (April, 1915). ] [Footnote 14: See above, ch. 8, secs. 6, 7; ch. 9, secs. 6, 8; ch. 10, secs. 14, 16; ch. 14, sec. 12. ]