According to the president’s economic adviser Lawrence Summers, “A good guess…is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working.”

Leaving aside the scary “five years from now” time frame for economic recovery, the question is what are we going to

So why did the economy generate jobs, yet unemployment increased? Because the government doesn’t include people that want jobs but have simply given up looking until the economy gets better. That’s when they “re-enter” the job market and *poof* unemployment ticks back up.

How long will that keep happening? The “official” long term unemployment is high:

Six and half million workers have been unemployed for more than six months.

Now, how high is the actual unemployment numbers, even those that the government quit tracking so they won’t look so bad? Ask ShadowStats:

Yep, as of April the real unemployment in this country ticked back up to 22%. Now look at the mean and median duration of unemployment — some people just can’t find work (or else they’re claiming to look for work while living on the taxpayer-funded dole).

Where are things headed?

Yet nothing in the textbooks says that the supply and demand for workers will intersect at a wage that is socially acceptable. At the high end, demand for skilled workers and those who rely on their brains will return when the economy does. At the other end, jobs in restaurants, nursing homes and health clubs — the jobs that are hard to automate or outsource — will come back, too.

In the middle, there will be some jobs for workers without much education, for the plumbers, electricians and software technicians. But not enough to go around.

Men who in an earlier era would have been making good money on the assembly line are, and will be, working security or greeting at Wal-Mart, jobs that almost anyone can do and thus jobs that don’t pay well.

That’s because a lot of the jobs that were lost in construction, factories and even offices will never re-materialize. Worse yet, as long as we provide unemployment benefits most of these less-educated workers will not secure a job [note: I am not advocating getting rid of unemployment!]:

On average, surveys find, the unemployed in the U.S. spend 40 minutes a day looking for work and 3 hours and 20 minutes a day watching TV.

The Wall Street Journal article goes on to analyze our choices. Basically:

1. Take a long term view and fix education, thus simultaneously reducing the uneducated workforce and increasing the supply of skilled labor and knowledge workers. [A good idea, but impossible to implement in the short term and maybe even the long term as long as one party continues to pander to the teacher unions.]
2. Force employers to hire more uneducated workers [hurting our ability to compete on the world market] or limit imports that threaten the jobs of less educated workers [which would initiate similar limits and tariffs on our goods in other countries].
3. Spend tax dollars on improving the country’s infrastructure [isn't that what the "stimulus" was supposed to do?], thus increasing the demand for labor in the short run while the economy improves.
4. Tax the employed to support the unemployed. [Remember the 40 minutes a day looking for work stat? This would be another entitlement that would never go away.]

Money quote:

Each approach has shortcomings. So does doing nothing. Sidelining a huge part of an entire generation of men would waste human potential, create economic misery for their families and fuel political discontent.

Exactly.

I would add that back in the day, you had to prove that you actually looked for work (made applications, went on interviews, etc.) in order to qualify for unemployment. How about getting people off the couch and back into society?

Can you think of any other possible paths?