One thing that I think is becoming increasingly clear is that there’s not going to be a “recovery” anytime soon. One place you see this is in the problem of the long-term unemployed:
Employers have a strong preference against hiring the long-term unemployed who face a number of barriers to employment on top of that. Unless something miraculous happens over the next six months, these numbers are only going to grow. And when you let unemployment fester like that, the line between the “cyclical” and the “structural” tends to blur away. Presumably more of the long-term jobless will drop out of the labor force altogether and this may impact the unemployment bottom line without really changing anything. Something similar can be said about youth unemployment. We’re well on the way to making a transformation into a society that will have a much larger not-worker sector on a sustained basis.
Previous in TP Yglesias
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the ThinkProgress Privacy Policy and agree to the ThinkProgress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policies as applicable, which can be found here.