Good article describing the long-term impacts of our short-term failure to address unemployment and jobs creation:

Everyone keeps calling it the Great Recession, as though they are not too depressed about the prolonged backslide in gross domestic product, which only recently resumed its upward climb.

Backslide may describe what happened to the market economy, but it doesn’t capture what’s happening now in families hit hardest by persistent unemployment.

They are suffering not a temporary setback, but a permanent reduction in their ability to develop their own and their children’s capabilities. Put in terms that economists are fond of, their human capital is being … decapitalized.

…

via The Great Deprivation – Economix Blog – NYTimes.com.