I’ve seen this so clearly, both in myself and my friends:
Long periods of unemployment drain our bank accounts and weaken the economy. New research suggests extended joblessness could also dampen our personalities. And that can make it harder to find more work.
A study published this month in the Journal of Applied Psychologyexamined a sample of 6,769 German adults — 3,733 men and 3,036 women — who took the same personality test twice in a four-year window. During the experiment, 251 subjects were unemployed for less than a year; 210 faced joblessness for one to four years.
The authors focused on five traits: conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion and openness. Dispositions of perpetually job-hunting people transformed considerably — and dismally — compared with their steadily working counterparts.
“Unemployment,” researchers wrote, “has one of the strongest impacts on well-being … often lasting beyond the period of unemployment and being comparable with that of becoming disabled.”
The findings in Germany have domestic implications. One characteristic of America’s slow economic recovery is the extraordinary number of people who have fallen into the ranks of the long-term unemployed, those unable to find jobs for 27 weeks or more. An estimated 3.4 million fit this description, by the Economic Policy Institute’s measure.
That figure doesn’t tell the whole story, of course: Some people take temporary gigs, only to tumble back into unemployment. Some just stop looking.
To exacerbate matters, our ability to find work may decline if self-esteem shrinks. Depression is higher among long-unemployed Americans,according to a recent Gallup poll: About one in five reported having depression. That’s nearly double the rate of those unemployed for five weeks or less.
The mental health impacts of unemployment can be devastating. A CDC study found suicide rates rise and fall with the economy.
“Public policy therefore has a key role to play in preventing adverse personality change in society through both lower unemployment rates and offering greater support for the unemployed,” Cco-author Christopher Boyce, research fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland, told theAmerican Association for the Advancement of Science.
Extended unemployment is purposely designed to change the attitudes of people. Unemployment is used as a tool by the Capitalist oligarchy (1%) to manipulate the minds of men.
The “boom and bust” cycles are not an accident of nature, something that mortal men simply can’t control. Keynes proved in the 1930’s.
Why, for example, does the Federal Reserve Bank design its monetary policy around a target unemployment rate of 5.5%? Wouldn’t you think that they would strive to get the unemployment rate to 0%? (For all those right wing economists out there please don’t bring up the theory of market elasticity to show why a 0% unemployment rate is not possible.)
And why do our politicians, our elected representatives, accept a 5.5% rate of unemployment as “full employment” under the law?
We are all being well regulated by the oligarchy, the Capitalist 1%.
EYup. I used to give a shit. Now I don’t.
If that were the intent, Im, it failed.
In my lifetime the “structural” unemployment/ full employment rate has been as low as 4%. There is no economic law that has changed that. It’s purely the butt covering interest of the incumbent political class. To answer your question Imho, the 5.5 % rate is full employment because “we” accept that bull.