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With financial markets finally settling and the economy beginning to post positive GDP growth,
policy makers are turning their attention to the 
 more daunting problem of the Great Recession
and that is the large number of individuals 
 who lost their jobs in that recession
and have still been unable to find new jobs.
This problem actually will be a legacy of the Great Recession.
It'll be one is the most difficult to solve by policy makers 
 and the one that probably causes the most pain and suffering.
There is no doubt that the recession took an enormous toll on jobs.
If you look from the peak of employment to the trough of 
 employment, we lost 8.8 million jobs in the United States;
that puts us back at an employment level that we haven't had since 1999
and actually erases a decade of growth in 
 jobs and in the economy more broadly.
Of course with this large loss of jobs unemployment in the United States skyrocketed
and it actually reached levels that we hadn't seen since 1980 
 which was also a deep and very painful recession.
If I add to that number, though, that broke through 10 percent,
if I add to that number the number of discouraged workers,
those who simply left the labor force all together and stopped 
 looking because they thought their prospects were so poor;
if I add those workers back in then we 
 have unemployment rates and discouraged worker rates
that we didn't even see in the 1980s recession. 
And, in fact, you'd have to go back closer to the Great Depression
to see this kind of pain and suffering in the US economy.
A distinguishing factor about this particular recession is that the job 
 losses in the United States were very broadbased. 
They weren't simply centered in construction and finance,
the two epicenters for the start of the recession,
but, in fact, spread to manufacturing, to retail and wholesale trade,
to leisure and hospitality sectors.
Importantly, even to professional and business services which have, for the last two decades,
felt somewhat immune to cuts in the US economy and declines in growth.
Another distinguishing factor about this recession is that we had 
 a rise in unemployment across the skill distribution.
Typically, college educated workers are a little more insulated than high school graduates are
but in this recession, whether you were a college graduate or you had 
 less than a high school education or a high school education,
you saw unemployment for your group double;
that means that newly minted college graduates
who literally have done everything we've asked them in investing in themselves
and their schooling and taken on careers that they 
 thought would deliver them at least a job,
if not a job with a growth and income that 
 they'd come to expect and seen their parents obtain;
those individuals were also unemployed and, in fact, are unemployed in record numbers.
We can't find a place in history where we've had college graduates coming out
and not being able to find jobs at the levels that they are today.
A third distinguishing characteristic about this recession is that 
 so many of the job cuts were permanent.
It is always the case, don't get me wrong,
that when we have a decline in the economy most job cuts are permanent.
About 65 percent, sometimes 75 percent of job cuts are permanent
but what is distinguishing about this particular recession
is that something closer to 85 percent of all 
 job cuts were severing the employment relationship
on a permanent basis and, in many cases, if you looked beneath those data
severing careers on a permanent basis.
So it's not just that I lose my job with an employer;
it's that I lose my career in construction or 
 finance or maybe in a manufacturing sector
or potentially even in the high tech or other sector.
So, you're severing permanently your relationship with an employer
and you're severing permanently your relationship with a career in many cases.
The final distinguishing characteristic and the one that 
 really, I think, creates a considerable amount
of pain and frustration among policy makers faced with fixing it
is the record high long term unemployment.
So, we're facing a problem now that nearly 50 percent, half,
of all workers who are unemployed have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more.
So, if you wake up in the morning and 
 listen to the radio or read the newspaper
you're not hearing people say "I have two to three months of unemployment."
They're saying "I have two to three years of unemployment."
When you're out of the labor force for two 
 to three years your skills start to depreciate.
You start to wonder "When will I ever get employed again?"
and "How will I get employed?" and this is the 
 problem that is a legacy for policy makers. 
They will need to think about "How do I spur the economy?"
How do we, collectively, spur the economy in a way that 
 not only gets the jobs growing at a faster pace
than we've currently seen but also grows jobs for people who have been unemployed
and left idle for two or three years?
How do we incorporate all of these individuals who lost their positions
in the Great Recession back into a labor market that's fully functioning going forward?
