Unemployment = The Plague

The plague that hits men and minorities the hardest.

According to every news outlet in the world, the projections for the decrease in unemployment rates are lookg rough. While many people look at what financially joblessness is doing to people TheAtlantic.com reports that it is the cultural change that is going to have the lasting impact.

1. Businesses have totally restructured, so even when if the economy bounces back, companies have already become more efficient and no longer need the dead weight.

2. The skills of the unemployed have erroded and now find themselves unquallified for things they used to be paid top dollar to do.

And lastly, taken directly from the article, economist Gary Burtless comments that,

3. “We haven’t seen anything like this before: a really deep recession combined with a really extended period, maybe as much as eight years, all told, of highly elevated unemployment,” Shierholz told me. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress.”

And stress as we know, leads to innovation, and innovation leads to things like this.

Just kidding.

We do think, however, that Gary Burtless may be on to something. The stress of finding work (or not finding as it turns out) has turned many would be junior financial analysts, marketing assistants, account coordinators and any other entry level position holders you can think of,into CEO's of WhateverTheyCanThinkOf LLC, RandomServices.com, or even YogueIN.blogspot.com etc....

This stress, is forcing an entire generation to innovate. Which may not be such a bad thing. The linked article explains that economists have felt that "dynamism in the U.S. has actually been in decline for a decade; with the housing bubble fueling easy (but unsustainable) growth for much of that time, we just didn’t notice." But that joblessness often brings with it a surge of innovation that can influence/nurture and fuel an economy for years to come.

So ,while the realities of a paying job are impossible to ignore, the recession has taught us that those realities may not be so worth it (job here today, gone tomorrow).

So instead of wearing uncomfortable shoes, and an uncomfortable smile at a probably uncomfortable interview today...start that thing that you think is a really good idea...even if no one else does.


God Bless Unemployment.

read full article here