No End to the Unemployment Problem in Sight

More on "duration matters":

No End in Sight, by James Surowiecki, New Yorker: The talk in Washington these days is all about budget deficits, tax rates, and the “fiscal crisis” that supposedly looms in our near future. But this chatter has eclipsed a much more pressing crisis here and now: almost thirteen million Americans are still unemployed. ...

Being unemployed is even more disastrous for individuals than you’d expect. Aside from the obvious harm—poverty, difficulty paying off debts—it seems to directly affect people’s health, particularly that of older workers. ...

Unemployment doesn’t hurt just the unemployed, though. It’s bad for all of us. Jobless workers, having no income, aren’t paying taxes, which adds to the budget deficit. More important, when a substantial portion of the workforce is sitting on its hands, the economy is going to grow more slowly...

Most worrying... Right now, unemployment is mainly the result of what economists call cyclical factors... But if high long-term unemployment continues there’s a danger that ... cyclical unemployment could become structural unemployment... The longer people are unemployed, the harder it is for them to find a job... Being out of a job can erode people’s confidence and their sense of possibility; and employers, often unfairly, tend to take long-term unemployment as a signal that something is wrong. A more insidious factor is that long-term unemployment can start to erode job skills...

You’d think that Congress and the Federal Reserve would be straining every sinew to avoid such a fate. It isn’t as if they’re out of tools. ... Sadly, there’s little sign that policymakers have much interest in using these tools. ...

I don't know how many ways, or how many times I can say that labor markets need more help than they are getting. It's futile, I know -- Congress turned its back on the unemployed long ago and the Fed is not inclined to fill the gap any more than it already has -- but I can't help trying.

This is from two years ago:

I've been pushing hard for more help for labor markets for quite awhile -- at times I've thought it was a bit repetitive, but necessary -- but it's probably time for me to give up and accept that we are going to have a slower recovery than we could have had with more aggressive fiscal policy. ... Congress is not going to provide anything more than token help from here forward. ...

I'll still complain -- there's no reason to let policymakers off the hook -- but it's time to give up the hope that anything more will be done to help the unemployed find jobs.

If we'd done more then -- or even earlier like many of us were calling for -- we'd be in much better shape today. The thing is, it's still not too late. If we do more now, two years from now we'll be happy that we did.