Good news! The economy added 163,000 jobs last month, just a bit over the level required to keep up with population growth. A return to a free fall now seems less likely. On the other hand, there is the small footnote that the return to full employment is nowhere in sight. The recovery looks safe for those of us who are not already screwed. That, sadly, has come to be the primary focus of our economic policy.In the years since the collapse of 2008, the existence of mass unemployment has stopped being something the economic powers that be even pretend to regard as a crisis. To those directly impacted, the economic crisis is an emergency, a life-altering disaster the damage from which will endure for years. But most of those in a position to address it simply have not seen it in such terms. History will record that the economic elite has viewed the economic crisis from a perspective of detached complacency.Read it at New York Magazine
Why Washington Accepts Mass Unemployment
Jonathan Chait
6 comments:
Here's Matt Yglesias yesterday:
To see how disappointing this is, imagine a very different world. This is a world where the US economy is growing at a modest pace but with an unemployment rate of 6.5 percent. That number is slowly falling and the employment-to-population ratio is slowly rising. The United Kingdom is in similar shape. Across the European continent, joblessness is a bit higher than that in a few countries but only absolute cranks are talking about the idea of the eurozone busting up. It's a world, in other words, where everything is basically fine.
So the punditry now thinks a world in which there is 6.5% unemployment would be fine.
The "new normal" is 6-8%. Nothing to worry about, right?
In the neoliberal world, no one will be allowed to work unless someone in their chosen group gets to profit from it. It's that simple.
The MMT idea that we can and should create money to put people to work is off the table.
Business must be in the position to handle the money first. They will be the job creators or no one will.
Feels like a hostage situation.
paul: Feels like a hostage situation.
Fells like it because it is and lots of people, especially younger people are catching on that the system is rigged against them and that unless they are debt slaves they are useless and expendable.
Wonder when those young people will start taking their own hostages?
Chait has it right though. It's about "I'm all right Jack."
"And he is saying to them, 'Why stand you here the whole day idle?'
7 They are saying to him that 'No one hires us.' Mat 20:6-7
"In as much as you do it to one of these, the least of My brethren, you do it to Me." Mat 25:40
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