“Three years into the economic recovery, but for millions of Americans it hasn’t yet begun.”
That sobering thought comes from an eye-opening and well-worth-reading commentary in this week’s New Yorker magazine about the extended high rate of unemployment in this country. I don’t read many economic reporters regularly, but James Surowiecki is an exception. He has a way of not making your eyes glaze over, despite the dryness of economic policies and stats.
He cites many reasons why we should be alarmed over the unemployment situation, including studies of how being unemployed is bad for your health and can increase your mortality risk. And he’s rightly troubled that the urgency isn’t alarming more people with the power to make a difference.
And I fear his conclusion is also right: We’re on the verge of accepting high unemployment as the norm.
“A long-term crisis, after a certain point, no longer seems like a crisis,” he writes. “It seems like the way things are.”
