No Problem, We'll Get those Lost Jobs back by 2015

Think again, the jobless recovery of 2010 may well be the jobless recovery of 2010-2015. The pacesetting econ blogger Mark Thoma writing his first post for the new CBS moneywatch.com blog "Maximum Utility" explains why, though he predicts 2013 as the full-employment mark.
No problem, by 2015 Big Brother will have a job for us all, I can't wait!

    The reason for the slow recovery is partly due to the depth of the recession — the deeper the hole, the longer it takes to crawl out of it — but it’s also because of the large amount of structural change that the economy must go through before it can recover. Prior to the recession we had too many resources in the housing, finance, and auto industries, and it will take time to move the people and resources who used to work in these industries into areas of the economy where they can be employed productively.

(growthology.org) My bearishness comes from the realization that monetary policy can only tighten and fiscal policy can only contract in the years ahead, making any upward trend in employment happen in a contractionary context. The body economic may be climbing out of the sand at the pace of 10,000 net new jobs a day, but the macro sand will be sliding back into the hole at 8,000 jobs a day. Like that metaphor?  America has not been in this situation in nearly a century, and nobody can tell you when it ends. Fortunately, we can tell you how it ends. It ends with a new economy, even more diversified as well as focused on services and knowledge work.

Mark mentioned the structural change in the economy. That's good news and bad. The good news is that new jobs will be in new sectors with arguably better pay and quality of life (i.e. I'd rather be a movie star than a coal miner ... rather be a nurse practitioner than a seamstress ... rather be a hammer than a nail). As jobs transition from goods-production to service-provision, workplace fatalities decline and pay rises, satisfaction rises and stress eases. The bad news (and where I disagree with Mark) is that traditional policy remedies -- based on a static notion that old employers will simply rehire the old laid-off workers when stimulated artificially or by real consumption -- can only disappoint. 

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