The urge to declare our unemployment problem “structural” — a supply-side problem of some kind, not solvable by the “simplistic Keynesian” notion of just increasing demand — has been quite something to behold. It’s rapidly entering the category of a zombie idea, which just keeps shambling forward no matter how many times it has been killed.

Basically, structural stories come in two variants: geography and skills. The geography story says that workers are in the wrong places; the skill story that they lack the right knowhow.

At this point both stories have been thoroughly debunked. Unemployment is high almost everywhere.

And via Mark Thoma, the very cautious Dave Altig looks at recent studies and concludes that

we’ve been pretty sympathetic to structural explanations for the slow pace of the recovery. Nonetheless, we have yet to find much evidence that problems with skill-mismatch are more important postrecession than they were prerecession. We’ll keep looking, but—as our colleagues at the Chicago Fed conclude in their most recent Chicago Fed Letter—so far the facts just don’t support skill gaps as the major source of our current labor market woes.

Am I totally certain that the problem isn’t structural? Hey, I’m not totally certain of anything! But there really is no evidence, none at all, for a story that nonetheless gets asserted as absolute fact in op-ed after op-ed.

And just think about the fact that this completely unsupported claim about structural unemployment is being used as an argument against doing anything to help millions of unemployed workers find jobs.

Incredible.