Paul Krugman: The Unlucky Unemployed

Matt O'Brien, a reporter at The Washington Post, recently wrote an interesting, if depressing, article on long-term unemployment in the United States, making the point that it is basically a matter of bad luck: if someone gets laid off in a bad economy, he has a hard time finding a new job; and the longer he stays unemployed, the harder it becomes to find work.

Obviously I agree with this analysis - and I'd add that Mr. O'Brien's results more or less decisively refute the alternative story, which is that the long-term unemployed (people who have been without a job for six months or more) are workers with a problem.