Ways Of Saying The Same Thing

If Gauti Eggertsson did a paper arguing that with an appropriate policy response unemployment would be 6.23 percent rather than 9.1 percent and thus that conservative efforts to foil demand-stimulating policies are forcing millions of Americans into needless suffering, would that attract headlines like "From the New York Fed, On Structural Unemployment" from libertarian blogs?

It seems to me that it wouldn't. And yet, this is precisely the conclusion of economic analysis that's on the high-end of estimates about the structural/cyclical share of unemployment. It's the Kocherlakota line problem all over again where David Brooks writes, "If we had a normal match between the skills workers possess and the skills employers require, then the unemployment rate would be 6.5 percent, not 9.6 percent" and doesn't see that this means there's a strong case for demand-stimulating policies. Structural unemployment poses some tricky problems and deserves a robust policy response. But the easiest policy response is to get rid of the massive overhand in cyclical unemployment that makes it nearly impossible to respond to the entrenched difficulties of the long-term unemployed, those lacking skills, etc.