Myspacing the United States Economy, Failing to Google the Pluses

Megan at the Atlantic worries about the long term unemployed, and the Atlantic seems to be pushing this theme in an additional long thought piece that spans four pages and incorporates a number of academic studies about the effects of joblessness on men, families, and communities. Here Megan wonders what to do with these people.

That is what these numbers mean: millions of people, staring into the abyss of an empty future.  We don't know how to re-employ them.  The last time this happened, in the Great Depression, World War II eventually came along and soaked up everyone in the labor force who could breathe and carry a toolbag. I hope to God we're not going to do that again, so what are we going to do with all these people?

(The Atlantic.com)

Well yes, we will see many long term unemployed people, especially in sectors like construction that were bubble-ized. We will also see it in education and a few other sectors getting hit for shortsighted or ideological reasons.  If we had a housing bubble from roughly 2006 or so forward, anything approaching those levels, whether in housing employment, general employment or prices, should be seen as abnormal. And until the banking industry fully swallows its losses, we also shouldn't expect to see much new hiring on the part of businesses or any new employment innovation. Basically the economy is like a body that overindulged and has regurgitated the excess onto the floor. Cleaning that up will take a while.

But, in the same way that people hyperventilated over Wall Street in 2007 and 2008, and imagined the industry forever chastened and changed, we should not overstate the problem here when it comes to unemployment and not imagine that something, some sector, will arise to somewhat normalize (not idealize) the work situation.  That is, if we let it. There has to be a fundamental "looking forward" where we attempt to foster and support new industries, rather than trying to recreate the past and return to some unsustainable work structure. We saw this twice, both in the dot.com boom, and recently in the housing boom, where the essential drivers of job growth were somewhat chimerical. We suffered for it, later and now.

Don Peck in the longer Atlantic piece wonders if this down period will make us all humbler, kinder, and move us away from our lusts for riches and large homes.

Journalists in particular always make the same mistakes over and over, and assume that what is here today is perpetually normative. It's what we can call Myspacing the economy, where the social network we see today is the one we assume will always be here.

The right stance is one of realistic optimism, and where we look outward and start adopting some of the policies that are working for some of our competitors, whether in Germany or China or elsewhere.