● Pinched: How the Great Recession Has Narrowed Our Futures and What We Can Do About It
By Don Peck
Interview with author via Marketplace/NPR
Author Don Peck examines how the Great Recession has affected individual Americans financially and psychologically, and discusses what impact those changes will have on American society overall…
“…the average duration of unemployment now is over nine months. And millions of people have been unemployed for a year or two years or more. And I think that what Gus’s story shows is not just the financial loss that results from unemployment, but the psychological loss. Happiness researchers have shown that being out of work for six months or more is really the worst thing that can happen to you psychologically. It’s the psychological equivalent of losing a spouse. So today in the U.S. we have millions of people who are in exactly that situation, and millions more with each year that goes by before we find recovery. And one of the big questions for the U.S., I think, is not just how do we recover, but even once we recover, what are we going to do to get these people — people have become chronically unemployed, whose behaviors have changes, whose skill have eroded — what are we going to do to get them back into the workplace?”
