Weekend Economists: Spock Lives! March 6-8, 2015

[xchrom]

53. what 27 weeks of unempolyment does to the American worker

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/what-27-weeks-of-unemployment-does-to-the-american-worker/387031/

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Even if February was 28 days of awful weather for most of the country, it was, all in all, a solid month for employment figures, with 295,000 new jobs added to the economy, and the closely watched unemployment rate slipping further, to 5.5 percent.

The February jobs report is the latest in a series that demonstrates that the job market in the U.S. is slowly but surely improving. According the Bureau of Labor Statistics, someone who is currently unemployed would need, on average, just over three months (about 13.1 weeks) to find work again. In 2010, it would’ve around 25.2 weeks, or almost half a year for the average American to get back into the job market, according to Pew Research.

To be certain, the recovery has provided some significant progress in the realm of overall unemployment—and economists say that much of that improvement has helped to alleviate the share of workers who are left jobless for extended periods of time. Between 2010 and 2014 about two-thirds of the overall unemployment decline went to reductions in long-term unemployment (characterized as those who've been out of work for 27 weeks or more, but are still searching), according to data from the Federal Reserve.