The aren’t parasites — they just have bad timing
by digby
Matt O’Brien has an interesting if depressing piece on long-term unemployment, making the point that long-term unemployment is basically bad luck: if you got laid off in a bad economy, you have a hard time finding a new job, and the longer you stay unemployed the harder it becomes to find work.
Obviously I agree with this analysis – and I’d add that O’Brien’s results more or less decisively refute the alternative story, which is that the long-term unemployed are workers with a problem.
He goes on to discuss the pervasive notion that the long-term unemployed are a special breed of lazy or inept workers. Obviously. Other people find work, why can’t they?
But here’s the thing: the association between worker quality and unemployment should be much stronger in a good economy than in a bad economy. In 2000, with labor scarce, there probably was something wrong with many people who got laid off; in 2009, it was just a matter of being in the wrong place. So if unemployment was about personal characteristics, being unemployed should have mattered less for job search after the Great Recession than before. What we actually see, of course, is the opposite.
It’s really a matter of bad timing. If you got laid off in a bad economy and were unable to find work right away, you become less and less employable, for a lot of reasons, none of which are your fault. But it provides a nice morality tale for the economic sadists so they persist in using this bad luck, bad timing story to tell a Randian tale of parasites and moochers.
Also too: as Krugman points out, this is where the government is truly indispensible:
And as O’Brien said, it’s one more reason failure to provide more stimulus is a crime against American workers.
There were a lot of reasons for that — almost all of them the result of political intransigence and ineptitude. What a bad time to have a crisis of such epic proportions,
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