Thanks to Calculated Risk

Quick question: What’s your job?

It’s a quick question… and a Big question.

Your job takes up a massive portion of your waking hours and supplies you the income to survive.

So… if you don’t have a job… you’ve got a serious problem (and a lot of time) on your hands.

Right now there are millions of Americans without jobs and recent reports suggest this will not change soon.

The blog Calculated Risk notes the average number unemployed has been at

above 400,000 all year after falling sharply during the last few months of 2010.

What comes up must come down, right? Maybe not, some economists fear.

Recently Justin Weidner and John Williams, of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggested that the natural unemployment rate (i.e. long term level) may have increased from the past rate of 5.0% and that

with a 6.7% natural rate, current and fore-casted levels of unemployment imply that significant labor market slack will persist for several years.

Over at Free Exchange, R.A. things that this study is by no means conclusive but it does

suggest that there has been some rise in the long-term structural rate of unemployment.  …the warning in these papers that labour market weakness will persist for some time is not encouraging; the longer workers go without jobs, the less employable they become.

Hey, at least employers don’t discriminate against the unemployed. Wait they do? Well, it can’t get any worse right?