No, really. She’s been getting a lot of grief from progressive bloggers for saying that extended unemployment benefits cause higher unemployment, and attributing that view to Larry Katz, who has gone to some pains to say that he believes no such thing.

But while Larry Katz doesn’t believe that unemployment has surged because the government has made being unemployed such a great deal, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago does — or at least he has been saying that unemployment is high not because employers have become less willing to hire, but because workers have become less willing to work. So Ms. Malkin’s theory of unemployment is no crazier than what’s coming out of some of our leading universities.

By the way, since I had to go through Casey Mulligan’s archives to do this post, I thought some readers might be interested in this gem.