I think Summers nails it:
I worry for the medium and long term about where the jobs are going to come from for those with fewer skills. One in five men between 25 and 54 is not working, and a reasonable projection is that it will still be one in six after the economy recovers. It was one in 20 in the 1960s. That has potentially vast social consequences.
Q. What do you see happening to those one in six?
There’s consequences for poverty. It has consequences for the government’s disability budget, crime, the ways in which children are raised.
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Another problem is not HOW MANY people are unemployed, but WHO is unemployed. It seems to me that decades ago it was something that happened to some people, by chance or coincidence. So everybody dreaded unemployment, but on the other hand everybody also had some sympathy for those (temporarily) hit by unemployment.
Now however, I can look at some kids or teenagers and already tell you that they will be unemployed for most of their lifes. And they themselves know it as well, as do their parents and their teachers. Whole parts of society are written off. And these different parts of sociey don’t interact with each other as people in one community should do. I think this by itself will have negative consequences for the unemployed in the long-term because those with jobs and money will regard them less like unfortunate brethren, but more like they now view underdeveloped countries on other continents.
The problem of course is that Summers’ devotion to the Reaganite “government is the problem” paradigm is a primary mover of this statistic.
We cannot do a jobs program because Barack Obama is in charge and he hired Larry Summers. President Obama will continue hiring, so we are stuck.
Read what the man says and think about it before you pooh-pooh it! We have been exporting low-to-mid skill jobs like crazy for decades, redefining ourselves as a “service economy” that does a mix of unexportable service work (restaurants, nail salons) and retains “high-value-added” work in finance, engineering, etc. Yet our schools still turn out millions of people only prepared for low-value work. The oversupply leads to downward pressure on wages at the bottom coupled with high unemployment, furthering our slide into an education-based caste system. This is not healthy in any way–economically or socially–and it undoes the enormous progress we made in the the postwar decades creating a true middle-c;ass nation.
The Europeans have been exporting manufacturing jobs as well, but not as recklessly and most countries have really good public schools and vocational training.
Gee, what about the consequences for the PEOPLE WHO ARE NOW PERMANENTLY OUT OF WORK? Where does that rank as compared to ‘the government’s disability budget’? (Or was that included in ‘poverty’?)
Why not just start a New Deal-style program where we hire are all these unemployable men as economic advisers for the government? They cannot possibly do a worse job than Larry Summers has…
David Brooks was going on about this same point a while back. I wonder why it’s such a big emergency that men in particular are out of work. Is there some sexism involved in our analysis of economic statistics?
I agree, Kevin. The “1 in 20” statistic from the 1960s is clearly being taken out of context. While that might speak to the current state of unemployment, I imagine it speaks more to the sexism of that era (and larry summers’ present-day sexism too!)