South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Mike Konczal thinks about who gets hired in America today.

It’s a very tough market out there for the large number of long-term unemployed. But the idea that they are ultimately unemployable doesn’t jump out at me from this data. If monetary or fiscal policy generated more jobs, this new unemployment-to-employment by duration data tells us that a historically disproportional number of jobs would go to the long-term unemployed, and that there is plenty of slack among all duration segments for more jobs.
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I’m still playing with this data and making up my mind on some of these conclusions, so I’m very interested in what you all think. But this is making me think that we don’t need job retraining, mobility support, or other magic tricks to help the long-term unemployed before we exhaust the simple mechanism of creating more jobs through a mix of monetary and fiscal policy.