For Middle-Aged Job Seekers, a Long Road Back

From the Wall Street Journal online:

...Much of the attention during the prolonged U.S. employment crisis has been on high rates of joblessness among young people.  

Less noticed, but no less significant to many economists, has been the plight of the middle-aged.

More than 3.5 million Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 were unemployed as of May, 39% of them for a year or more—a rate of long-term unemployment that is unprecedented in modern U.S. history, and far higher than among younger workers. Millions more have quit looking for work or ... have taken part-time jobs to get by.

"I try not to think that this is the end and I'm just going to have to shut everything down," Mr. Daniel says. "My mind doesn't work that way. I think that if I can get up I'll find something. I've got to keep moving."

The two decades between 40 and 60 are meant to be workers' prime years for earning and building wealth, the period when they buy homes, send children to college and save for retirement.

Unemployment, especially for an extended period, can short-circuit that process. The effect can span generations, because middle-age workers are more likely to be supporting retired parents, sending their children to college or supporting adult children.

Part of what set the most recent recession apart from the milder downturns of the 1990s and early 2000s, argues Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago, is that this recession didn't primarily strike young workers, or those with erratic work histories. It also hit productive, steady workers in the prime of their careers—people who are ordinarily the backbone of the economy.

In the 1990s, the unemployment rate among 45- to 64-year-olds peaked at 5.7%. In the brutal downturn of the 1980s, that jobless rate barely topped 7%. This time, it topped out at 8.2%....

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Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303506404577448751320412974.html