I refer not just to the despair and desperation that workers and their families must feel as weeks of unemployment stretch into months and even years, which alone should be enough to elicit a policy response, but also to what occurs when the ranks of the unemployed remain so great for so long – the erosion of skills and labor market attachment may affect the productive capacity of the economy as a whole.
The state of the labor market today Let me start with some basic statistics that summarize the current state of the labor market. The most familiar of these is the unemployment rate, which, except for a couple of months earlier this year, has been at or above 9 percent since mid-2009.