‘HOW A NEW JOBLESS ERA WILL TRANSFORM AMERICA, ‘ by Don Peck in the Atlantic Monthly. Interviewed on the Newhour last night. “We’re about to see a big national experiment on stress.”

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

The Great Recession may be over, but this era of high joblessness is probably just beginning. Before it ends, it will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar men. It could cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a despair not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years to come.

By Don Peck

HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.

The Long Road Ahead

SINCE LAST SPRING, when fears of economic apocalypse began to ebb, we’ve been treated to an alphabet soup of predictions about the recovery. Various economists have suggested that it might look like a V (a strong and rapid rebound), a U (slower), a W (reflecting the possibility of a double-dip recession), or, most alarming, an L (no recovery in demand or jobs for years: a lost decade). This summer, with all the good letters already taken, the former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote on his blog that the recovery might actually be shaped like an X (the imagery is elusive, but Reich’s argument was that there can be no recovery until we find an entirely new model of economic growth).

No one knows what shape the recovery will take. The economy grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent in the third quarter of last year, the first increase since the second quarter of 2008. If economic growth continues to pick up, substantial job growth will eventually follow. But there are many reasons to doubt the durability of the economic turnaround, and the speed with which jobs will return.

Historically, financial crises have spawned long periods of economic malaise, and this crisis, so far, has been true to form. Despite the bailouts, many banks’ balance sheets remain weak; more than 140 banks failed in 2009. As a result, banks have kept lending standards tight, frustrating the efforts of small businesses—which have accounted for almost half of all job losses—to invest or rehire. Exports seem unlikely to provide much of a boost; although China, India, Brazil, and some other emerging markets are growing quickly again, Europe and Japan—both major markets for U.S. exports—remain weak. And in any case, exports make up only about 13 percent of total U.S. production; even if they were to grow quickly, the impact would be muted.

Most recessions end when people start spending again, but for the foreseeable future, U.S. consumer demand is unlikely to propel strong economic growth. As of November, one in seven mortgages was delinquent, up from one in 10 a year earlier. As many as one in four houses may now be underwater, and the ratio of household debt to GDP, about 65 percent in the mid-1990s, is roughly 100 percent today. It is not merely animal spirits that are keeping people from spending freely (though those spirits are dour). Heavy debt and large losses of wealth have forced spending onto a lower path.

So what is the engine that will pull the U.S. back onto a strong growth path? That turns out to be a hard question. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who fears a lost decade, said in a lecture at the London School of Economics last summer that he has “no idea” how the economy could quickly return to strong, sustainable growth. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, told the Associated Press last fall, “I think the unemployment rate will be permanently higher, or at least higher for the foreseeable future. The collective psyche has changed as a result of what we’ve been through. And we’re going to be different as a result.”

One big reason that the economy stabilized last summer and fall is the stimulus; the Congressional Budget Office estimates that without the stimulus, growth would have been anywhere from 1.2 to 3.2 percentage points lower in the third quarter of 2009. The stimulus will continue to trickle into the economy for the next couple of years, but as a concentrated force, it’s largely spent. Christina Romer, the chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last fall, “By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to further growth,” adding that she didn’t expect unemployment to fall significantly until 2011. That prediction has since been echoed, more or less, by the Federal Reserve and Goldman Sachs.

The economy now sits in a hole more than 10 million jobs deep—that’s the number required to get back to 5 percent unemployment, the rate we had before the recession started, and one that’s been more or less typical for a generation. And because the population is growing and new people are continually coming onto the job market, we need to produce roughly 1.5 million new jobs a year—about 125,000 a month—just to keep from sinking deeper.

Even if the economy were to immediately begin producing 600,000 jobs a month—more than double the pace of the mid-to-late 1990s, when job growth was strong—it would take roughly two years to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in. The economy could add jobs that fast, or even faster—job growth is theoretically limited only by labor supply, and a lot more labor is sitting idle today than usual. But the U.S. hasn’t seen that pace of sustained employment growth in more than 30 years. And given the particulars of this recession, matching idle workers with new jobs—even once economic growth picks up—seems likely to be a particularly slow and challenging process.

The construction and finance industries, bloated by a decade-long housing bubble, are unlikely to regain their former share of the economy, and as a result many out-of-work finance professionals and construction workers won’t be able to simply pick up where they left off when growth returns—they’ll need to retrain and find new careers. (For different reasons, the same might be said of many media professionals and auto workers.) And even within industries that are likely to bounce back smartly, temporary layoffs have generally given way to the permanent elimination of jobs, the result of workplace restructuring. Manufacturing jobs have of course been moving overseas for decades, and still are; but recently, the outsourcing of much white-collar work has become possible. Companies that have cut domestic payrolls to the bone in this recession may choose to rebuild them in Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Bangalore, accelerating off-shoring decisions that otherwise might have occurred over many years.

New jobs will come open in the U.S. But many will have different skill requirements than the old ones. “In a sense,” says Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution, “every time someone’s laid off now, they need to start all over. They don’t even know what industry they’ll be in next.” And as a spell of unemployment lengthens, skills erode and behavior tends to change, leaving some people unqualified even for work they once did well.

Ultimately, innovation is what allows an economy to grow quickly and create new jobs as old ones obsolesce and disappear. Typically, one salutary side effect of recessions is that they eventually spur booms in innovation. Some laid-off employees become entrepreneurs, working on ideas that have been ignored by corporate bureaucracies, while sclerotic firms in declining industries fail, making way for nimbler enterprises. But according to the economist Edmund Phelps, the innovative potential of the U.S. economy looks limited today. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, he and his co-author, Leo Tilman, argue 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. Phelps and Tilman finger several culprits: a patent system that’s become stifling; an increasingly myopic focus among public companies on quarterly results, rather than long-term value creation; and, not least, a financial industry that for a generation has focused its talent and resources not on funding business innovation, but on proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, and arcane financial engineering. None of these problems is likely to disappear quickly. Phelps, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the “natural” rate of unemployment, believes that until they do disappear, the new floor for unemployment is likely to be between 6.5 percent and 7.5 percent, even once “recovery” is complete.

It’s likely, then, that for the next several years or more, the jobs environment will more closely resemble today’s environment than that of 2006 or 2007—or for that matter, the environment to which we were accustomed for a generation. Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, notes that if the recovery follows the same basic path as the last two (in 1991 and 2001), unemployment will stand at roughly 8 percent in 2014.

“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.”

‘WHAT WILL WE KNOW & WHEN WILL WE KNOW IT?,’ by Simon Johnson at baselinescenario .com.

What Will We Know And When Will We Know It?

Posted: 26 Feb 2010 11:06 AM PST

By Simon Johnson

One of the most basic questions in economics is: Which countries are rich and which are relatively poor?  Or, if you prefer a highly relevant question for today’s global situation, who recovers faster and sustains higher growth?

The simplest answer, of course, would be just to compare incomes – i.e., which country’s residents earn the most money, on average, at a point in time and how does that change over time?

But prices differ dramatically across countries, so $1,000 in the United States will generally buy fewer goods and services than would the same $1,000 in Guinea-Bissau (although this immediately raises issues regarding consumer’s preferences, the availability of goods, and the quality of goods in very different places.)

The standard approach developed by economists and statisticians, working with great care and attention to detail on a project over the past 40 years known as the “Penn World Tables”, is to calculate a set of “international prices” for goods – and then to use these to calculate measures of output and income in “purchasing power parity terms.”  For countries with lower market prices for goods and services, this will increase their measured income relative to countries with higher market prices (with Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita being the standard precise definition, but components and variations are also calculated along the way).

Some of the limitations inherent in the Penn Tables are well known.  But it turns out there are other, quite serious issues, that should have a big effect on how we handle these data – and how doubtful we are when anyone claims that a particular country has grown fast or slow relative to other countries.

The Penn Tables are based on collecting detailed price information – what it actually costs to buy all kinds of things in different places.  But the basic problem is that the people running the Tables do not have access to such data for all years and all countries – so they have to make a number of moderately heroic assumptions.

In “Is Newer Better?”, we show that a particular technical issue – the extrapolation of estimated price levels backwards and forwards in time – has a big impact on estimated GDP.  This in turn changes, dramatically in some cases, the calculated growth rates for particular countries; and these changes can be huge for smaller countries with less good data, particularly when the year in question is quite far from the moment when prices were actually “benchmarked” though direct observation.

Just to illustrate our point, in Table 1 we show that the ranking of growth rates – e.g., top 10 and worst 10 countries, in terms of growth performance – within Africa, from 1975 to 1999, is completely different if you use Penn World Tables version 6.1 or if you use version 6.2.  Just speaking for ourselves, we were quite shocked by these differences – and consequently spent a long time digging through the details (see the appendices of the paper for much more than you wanted to know about how this kind of sausage is made).  We’ve also tried to figure out exactly how much these issues matter both for how people have studied growth in the past (to do this, we replicated and checked the robustness of 13 influential and indicative papers), and for how to think about (and measure) economic success and failure moving forward.

Our bottom line is: while the Penn Tables are reasonably reliable for comparing changes in income level over long periods of time (e.g., 30-40 years), they are much less appealing – and results based on them will generally not be robust – as a source for annual data.  You should regard claims based on such annual data with a great deal of skepticism.

We also suggest there is a different and – for some purposes – better way to use the information in the Tables (see Section 6 of our paper).  In essence, we suggest combining estimated GDP levels directly from the Tables, rather than using the standard (and problematic) extrapolation method.

Looking at annual growth rates from national statistics is fine – or at least raises different issues – for thinking about short-term growth dynamics (i.e., who is in crisis, who is recovering, who may be overheating).  But for considering longer-run comparisons, say over 5-10 years or longer, you unfortunately cannot avoid worrying about comparable prices and some sort of purchasing power adjustment.

Whether or not you like our specific proposal, the main takeaway point is the same: do not rely on just one growth series.  Check that your claims (or anyone else’s) hold across different versions of the Penn World Tables, and – if you are focused on annual growth rates – look also at estimates from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

If you are interested in these issues more broadly, see the papers presented at the ”Measuring and Analyzing Economic Development” conference at the University of Chicago today.

‘PREPARING FOR THE INEVITABLE BURSTING BUBBLE,’ the Your Money column in the N.Y. Times. Pass it on!

YOUR MONEY

Preparing for the Inevitable Bursting Bubble

By RON LIEBER

Published: February 26, 2010

Financial bubbles are a way of life now. They can upend your industry, send your portfolio into spasms and leave you with whiplash. And then, once you’ve recovered, the next one will hit.

How are you preparing for the next bubble?

Or so you might think, as a veteran of two gut-wrenching market declines and a housing bubble over the last decade.

There’s plenty of reason to expect more surprises, given the number of hedge funds moving large amounts of money quickly around the world and the big banks making their own trades.

Individuals, as always, may be tempted to make their own financial bets, too. Last time, they bought overpriced homes with too much borrowed money. Next time, who knows what the bubble will be? And that’s the problem, as it always is. How do you identify the next thing that will pop? Is it China? Or Greece? Or Treasury bonds? It is difficult to predict and make the right defensive (or offensive) moves at the correct moment to save or make money.

Still, if you want to better insulate yourself from bubbles — however often they may inflate — there are plenty of things you can do. Your debt levels matter, and you may want to consider a more flexible investment strategy. But perhaps most important, this is a mental exercise that begins and ends with an honest assessment of your long-term goals and how you handle the emotional jolts that come from the bubbles that burst along the way.

FIXED EXPENSES Start with the basics. The less you have to pay toward monthly obligations, the better off you are, and that’s especially true at a time of economic disruption. You certainly wouldn’t want any bills increasing, so now’s a good time to refinance to a fixed-rate mortgage.

Whittle down student loan and credit card debt, too, and pay cash for your car if possible. “Flexibility is priceless in a time of panic,” said Lucas Hail, a financial planner with Foster & Motley in Cincinnati.

SELF-RELIANCE Then take a hard look at how much you should rely on promises from the government. Social Security and Medicare may not fit the traditional definition of bubbles, but that hasn’t stopped Rick Brooks from advising his financial planning clients to expect less from both programs. “Something that is not sustainable will not continue. It just can’t,” he said of Medicare.

Mr. Brooks, the vice president for investment management with Blankinship & Foster in Solana Beach, Calif., said anyone under 50 should assume that Medicare will look nothing like it does now and examine private health insurance premiums for guidance as to what may need to be spent on health care in retirement. Meanwhile, the firm advises current retirees to assume a 20 percent cut in Social Security benefits at some point.

Bedda D’Angelo, president of Fiduciary Solutions in Durham, N.C., has an equally stark outlook on long-term employment risk. If there are two adults in the household, your goal should probably be to have two incomes instead of one. “I do believe that unemployment is inevitable,” she said, adding that people who think they are going to retire at 65 should save for retirement as if they will be forced out of the work force in their mid-50s.

PORTFOLIO TACTICS Perhaps you did what you thought you were supposed to during the last decade. You got religion and stopped trading stocks. Then, you split your assets among various low-cost mutual funds and added money regularly. And the results weren’t quite what you hoped.

Tempted to make big bets on emerging markets or short Treasury bills? You’ve landed in the middle of the debate between those who favor a more passive asset allocation and those who prefer something called tactical allocation.

The first camp sets up a practical mix of investments, according to a target level of risk, and then readjusts back to that mix every year or so.

They frown on the hubris of the tactical practitioners. To make a tactical approach work, they note, you need to know what the right signals will be to buy and sell everything from stocks to gold, during every future market cycle. Then, these tacticians need to have the discipline to act each and every time. This is extraordinarily hard.

The tacticians, however, believe they have no choice. “What consumers need to know is that no matter how comforting it is to believe a formulaic approach or prepackaged investment product will allow them to put their financial future on autopilot, our current and future financial environment will require advice, diligence, education and responsiveness, which takes into account strategic consideration of geopolitical and economic relationships,” as Ryan Darwish, a financial planner in Eugene, Ore., put it to me this week.

Mr. Darwish scoffed at the notion of mere bubbles and said he thought that more fundamental and far-reaching shifts were under way, like the transfer of economic power from the United States to China and other nations.

A growing number of financial planners are embracing a middle, more measured approach: If diversification across stocks, bonds and other asset classes has proved to be a good thing in most investing environments, why not diversification around investment approaches?

“I am not a financial genius, but the geniuses are even worse off because they’re anchored on one philosophy,” said David O’Brien, a financial planner in Midlothian, Va. So he and a growing number of his peers have added some strategies to their baseline portfolios aimed at losing less during bubbles while still gaining in better times. “We’re not trying to shoot for the moon,” he added.

These tactics can include managed futures, absolute return funds, merger arbitrage and other approaches that will get their own column someday.

The embrace of all this even led one investment professional I spoke with this week to express the ultimate sacrilege: It really is different this time.

Thomas C. Meyer of Meyer Capital Group in Marlton, N.J., noted that many of these alternative strategies were not even available in mutual-fund form three to four years ago. So that’s different. He’s now putting 30 percent of his clients’ equity portfolios into such investments.

The big change, however, is that the baby boomer money is getting older. People are further along in their careers than they were during the market crash in 1987, and they can’t rely on pensions as so many more near retirees could in the 1980s (while shrugging off stock market volatility). And the boomers don’t have as much time to make up lost ground, especially if they’re already retired.

“Losing less means a lot right now,” Mr. Meyer said. “So we want to suck volatility out where we can.”

MATTER OF THE MIND But can you live with less volatility — and the permanent end of occasional portfoliowide returns in the teens or higher? Markets run on greed and fear; bubbles expand and deflate thanks to outsize versions of each. One of the few things you can predict about bubbles is that they will test your conviction on where you sit along the fear-greed continuum.

And once they pop, you’ll know a bit more about how your mind works than you did before.

This last downturn was severe enough that about 10 percent of Steven A. Weydert’s clients realized that they had overestimated their own risk tolerance. “Ideally, with an asset allocation, you never want to look back and say you’re sorry,” said Mr. Weydert of Bowyer, Weydert Wealth Planning Partners in Park Ridge, Ill.

So rather than trying to predict the number and type of bubbles, it may make more sense to look inward when trying to predict the future. Bob Goldman, a financial planner in Sausalito, Calif., said that clients often looked at him blankly when he asked them what it was they imagined for themselves in the future. Sometimes, they need to go home and figure out what sort of life it is that they’re saving for — and how much (or little) it might cost.

“People come in and talk about how we all know that inflation is going to explode next year,” Mr. Goldman said. “Well, we don’t all know that. We don’t know anything. But we can know something about our own lives, and there is a person we can talk to about that. A person in the mirror.”