I AM HOPPING MAD - I just finished reading How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America, by The Atlantic editor Don Peck, which details the social, emotional, and physical damage that is laid on a population by economic hard times.
A large and long-standing body of research shows that physical health tends to deteriorate during unemployment, most likely through a combination of fewer financial resources and a higher stress level. The most-recent research suggests that poor health is prevalent among the young, and endures for a lifetime. Till Von Wachter, an economist at Columbia University, and Daniel Sullivan, of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, recently looked at the mortality rates of men who had lost their jobs in Pennsylvania in the 1970s and ’80s. They found that particularly among men in their 40s or 50s, mortality rates rose markedly soon after a layoff. But regardless of age, all men were left with an elevated risk of dying in each year following their episode of unemployment, for the rest of their lives. And so, the younger the worker, the more pronounced the effect on his lifespan: the lives of workers who had lost their job at 30, Von Wachter and Sullivan found, were shorter than those who had lost their job at 50 or 55—and more than a year and a half shorter than those who’d never lost their job at all. (Emphasis mine.)
This is just one paragraph from an incredible, lengthy article - available entirely for free on the web, so there's no excuse for anyone to not read it. IT IS IMPORTANT!
In his 1996 Book, When Work Disappears, the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson connected the loss of jobs from inner cities in the 1970s to the many social ills that cropped up after that. "The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness," he wrote,
are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which many people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods—crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on—are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.
SNIP
Wilson, age 74, is a careful scholar, who chooses his words precisely and does not seem given to overstatement. But he sounded forlorn when describing the "very bleak" future he sees for the neighborhoods that he’s spent a lifetime studying. There is "no way," he told me, "that the extremely high jobless rates we’re seeing won’t have profound consequences for the social organization of inner-city neighborhoods." Neighborhood-specific statistics on drug addiction, family dysfunction, gang violence, and the like take time to compile. But Wilson believes that once we start getting detailed data on the conditions of inner-city life since the crash, "we’re going to see some horror stories"—and in many cases a relapse into the depths of decades past. "The point I want to emphasize," Wilson said, "is that we should brace ourselves." (Emphasis mine.)
This article and the long line of facts and studies it contains just makes me absolutely disgusted with the ass-hats here who were pushing the idea of "green shoots" last spring and summer, and who are now pushing back against the "populist rage against Wall Street that is just as bad as that coming from the teabaggers." Honest, some creep actually wrote that comment here a couple of days ago.
And what really makes me furious is that Obama's team KNOWS how huge is social, emotional, and physical costs the American people are going to have to pay in the decades ahead. One of the experts Peck quotes has been an close economic adviser to President Obama since the earliest days of the campaign.
"Graduates’ first jobs have an inordinate impact on their career path and [lifetime earnings]," wrote Austan Goolsbee, now a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, in The New York Times in 2006. "People essentially cannot close the wage gap by working their way up the company hierarchy. While they may work their way up, the people who started above them do, too. They don’t catch up."
There is no excuse. None. What is happening to the U.S. and world economy is a moral outrage, because it did not have to happen. With all the science, the surveys, the polls, the studies, the seminars, conducted by thousands of sociologists and psychologists and economists and professors and grad students and interns, with all the massive knowledge our society has accumulated since the last Great Depression, we have let it happen all over again.