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The ‘Forgotten, Silent Crowd’

While Dan Gross is saying the recession is over, the unemployment rate is hitting levels nearing the Great Depression. But as the New York Times’ David Leonhardt points out — it doesn’t feel like the Great Depression. The vast unemployed are not becoming the vast homeless. The few breadlines that there are have not become legion. On this site, we have even noted the “Nouveau Poor” — the pretension of the downturn, as a fashionable posture.

The point that is missing is that this is a new kind of downturn. This is the Great Recession because it is not just any recession, in which primarily lower levels of the labor ladder are hit — those closer to the poverty line who therefore find themselves literally on the street when hard times hit. In this recession, joblessness has cut through all socioeconomic rungs. Just because the millions of people who have been laid off haven’t all checked in to Skid Row with their hobo sacks doesn’t make them any more employed. They are, as this unemployed lawyer put it in Leonhardt’s story, “a forgotten, silent crowd.”

The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.

Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.”