WurfWhile

A must-read for today, see Bob Herbert’s New York Times Op Ed The Unrecognizable Recovery. A lot of scary stuff there, but perhaps the most profound thing that struck me, more than job creation numbers revised down over the past months, more than increased time for the long-term jobless before finding work, more than the bleak prospects for the educated and skilled, more even than the “historic lows” (lowest ever since 1948) of 16-19 year-olds participating in the workforce, was a study of black men working in New York City. The study found “[u]sing the employment-population ratio, which is the proportion of the working-age population with a job, it found - incredibly - that nearly one of every two black men between the ages of 16 and 64 was not working last year.” By comparison, the Great Depression (at least for the general population) was a third of the working population out of work. New York City is home to about a quarter of the U.S. black population, about 2.3 million, and (nationally) black people between 16 and 64 make up over 60% of the population. So we’re talking about out of a working-age population of roughly 1.4 million people - half of the men are out of work. With two people working needed to sustain a family (much less be middle class) in today’s economy, I don’t even know what you say about a statistic like that.