A few further thoughts inspired by the sad revelation that Beltway conventional wisdom has settled on the proposition that high unemployment is structural, not cyclical, even though there is now a bipartisan consensus among economists that the opposite is true.

First, about the meaning of terms: When economists talk about rising “structural” unemployment, what they actually mean is something quite specific — it’s not vague hand-waving, it’s the assertion that the “full-employment” rate of unemployment, the level of unemployment at which prices and wages start to rise and you risk a wage-price spiral, has increased. When that happens, you can’t solve the unemployment problem just by getting someone to spend more and thereby increasing demand; when it hasn’t happened, you can.

What about all the other things we talk about, like the variation of unemployment across regions or occupations or skills? Well, since the usual story about rising structural unemployment involves some kind of “mismatch” between workers and jobs, you’d expect the “signature” of this mismatch to be the emergence of shortages of workers somewhere or of some kind; so the fact that you don’t see this militates against structural stories. But the ultimate question is always, how low can we push unemployment before inflation becomes a problem — and there is essentially no evidence that this number has gone up since 2007, let alone that it is somewhere near the current unemployment level.

And as I said, there is now a much stronger consensus that unemployment is cyclical, not structural, than there was a couple of years ago. I mentioned Eddie Lazear’s paper at Jackson Hole; there was also Naryana Kocherlakota’s change of heart (for which he deserves major props — the number of economic analysts willing to change their views in the face of evidence is much too small).

So what we have here is an economic discussion working the way things are supposed to work — slower than I’d like, but still,in the end we did have the professionals concluding that one popular story about the nature of our troubles was wrong.

And the pundit class, it seems, paid no attention. Talking about “structural” sounds serious, or maybe Serious, so that’s what they say, even though the evidence is all the other way. And it’s not even “views differ on the shape of the planet” territory: PBS viewers weren’t even given a hint that the professional consensus exists. It’s as if you had a program on climate and only climate-change deniers were represented.

And maybe we should put this in the context of another debate, the big one over austerity. Here too there has been a rather decisive turn in professional opinion; there are a lot of dead-enders even within the economics profession, but the fact remains that both pillars of the pro-austerity position — claims of expansionary austerity, and claims that terrible things happen when debt crosses some rather low threshold — have collapsed, spectacularly. Yet policy hasn’t changed at all; at best there have been tiny adjustments at the margin in Europe, and in the US we’re still slashing spending in the face of a weak economy.

It’s pretty depressing for those who would like to believe that analysis and evidence matter. The recent evolution of both policy and conventional wisdom on macroeconomics seems to suggest otherwise.