Two graphs that should really scare us

Both of these come from the International Monetary Fund's new paper (pdf) on employment, which is graph-tastic. The first looks at the long-term effect unemployment has on the average male's long-term earnings.

So a 25-year-old worker whose firm went under in 2008 will still be earning less than the guy in the office park across from him whose firm barely rode out the recession. We tend to think of employment as being binary: You have a job, or you don't. But it's more complicated than that. Losing a job has lingering effects, and not just on income. It also raises your risk of death going forward:

This is one reason that jobs-sharing proposals like the one Germany implemented make some real sense: Keeping the maximum number of people in their jobs -- even if you temporarily reduce their hours or wages -- means fewer people losing their jobs altogether. That means their skills don't deteriorate, it means they're less likely to have to take a new job that they're not as good at or where they're paid a lot less, it means they don't have to explain away their unemployment to prospective employers, and so on.