Why Unemployment Matters
10th July 2011
Megan McArdle runs the numbers.
I wrote earlier about what the jobs numbers mean for the 2012 election (hint: they are not good for the current administration). But at some level, who cares? This is the aspect that concerns Washington most, but it is surely the least important consideration: neither Barack Obama, nor his staff, are going to have any trouble finding new employment in the event that they are terminated come January 2013.
Yeah, Barack & family aren’t in danger of winding up in a homeless shelter.
That’s why long-term unemployment has become such a problem. Our unemployment problem is not, as in previous recessions, that too many people are entering unemployment. Layoffs and discharges are actually lower than they’ve been in a decade. Rather, our problem is that people aren’t exitingunemployment. And that’s a much bigger issue.
Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset. The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers. You lose market intelligence and industry connections. Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy. And as my colleague Don Peck wrote in a devastating piece last year, the psychological effects of long-term unemployment change you permanently. Many of the people who have now been unemployed for years may never work again, or not at anything like the income that they had been expecting.
The least important change was the one that is best measured: people who have a bout of unemployment at the beginning of their careers still earn less than their peers ten years later. What really matters is how it changed my outlook on the world. I became afraid then in a way that has never really left me. I obsess about economic security. I catastrophize small setbacks. Before 2001, I was fairly blithely indifferent to the prospect of misfortune; now I spend an awful lot of time cataloguing everything that could possibly go wrong. My grandfather used to hide pretty substantial sums of money around the house, the legacy of the Great Depression’s bank failures, which I thought was very funny. Now it sounds sort of sensible.