The "Will It Work? How Will We Know?" video and presentations are now online.

Click through there to get all the PDFs of chapters by author along with a short video, as well as the entire volume in one PDF.

It's all worth your time.  I enjoyed the opening remarks by Congressman Brad Miller and Senator Jeff Merkley.

Miller in particular talked about being a Congressman in the lead-up to the financial crisis and mentions how the blogosphere was one of the counter-measures to the lobbyists. Miller: "One of the most striking, perhaps the most striking aspect....about working on this issue...is the lack of a policy infrastructure for any point of view other than the point of view of the banks. There simply was no expertise available to us." This is something I noticed from a distance after the crisis, and something we work on here at the Roosevelt Institute.

(Miller's joke about John Edwards after the first minute is also really funny.)

After the four minute mark, Miller talks about cramdown, which gives a good overview of 2007. He also talks about his realizations relating to hidden losses in the books on properties from the S&L days. Miller had a Daily Kos diary where he talked about cramdown at length back in 2007 that got a lot of it right in retrospect.

Jennifer Taub's talk about the Office of Financial Research struck the right tone between the possibilities of what can be accomplished, for better or for worse, depending on how well it is managed and whether or not a Republican Congress smashes it to pieces in funding and harassment a few years from now.

We'll be returning to this in the next few weeks as we cover each of the topics. But for now check out the page. Or if you want a high-level overview, check out this one page summary of several of the goals suggested by conference participants for determining whether or not financial reform is working. What would you add to the list?

Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past.

Last week, in a little-noticed story, the German government announced that on October 3 -- the twentieth anniversary of German Unification -- Germany would make the final payment on the debts it acquired through the allied demand for reparations in the aftermath of World War I. The timing of this development is interesting. It brings to mind one more example of the misguided economic policies that came in the wake of the First World War, which contributed to the financial collapse that brought about the Great Depression. We now know that these polices -- which included the passage of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff that raised import duties to their highest level in American history, competitive devaluation of currencies among the leading industrialized nations, and other protectionist measures such as exchange controls -- were contributing factors to the onset and severity of the Depression. They also helped propel Adolf Hitler into power in Germany and hence had horrific consequences far beyond mere economics. How did the world get into this mess? And are we in danger of repeating some of the same mistakes today?

In the wake of the carnage wrought by the world's first truly "total war" -- the British alone lost over nineteen thousand men on the first day of the Battle of the Somme -- the desire for revenge against Germany was very strong, especially in France and Belgium, where large areas were devastated by the conflict. This sentiment, coupled with the fairly widespread belief among the allied powers that Germany was responsible for starting the war (Germany certainly bore a large share of the responsibility, but there were other forces at work as well), led to ever-increasing calls for Germany to pay for it. The allies had also taken on huge debts during the conflict, mostly owed to the United States, which emerged from the war as the world's leading creditor nation. Based on these determinations, the allies included the so-called "war guilt clause" in the Treaty of Versailles, which stated that Germany must accept responsibility for "causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war..."

Having concluded that Germany was liable for the cost of the war, the allies imposed a reparations regime upon Germany that called for a payment of 269 billion gold marks. The treaty also stripped Germany of her overseas colonies and investments, drastically reduced the size of her military, eliminated her merchant marine, and split the country in two so as to provide a corridor to the sea for the newly reconstituted country of Poland.

Needless to say, these measures placed a significant economic (not to mention psychological) burden on the inchoate Weimar Republic. This was especially true with respect to the reparations, for as John Maynard Keynes observed in his landmark work The Economic Consequences of the Peace, the reparations not only involved payments of gold and/or foreign currency, they also transferred important coal, iron and steel properties from Germany to France and prohibited their utilization by German industry. The treaty as such struck at the very heart of the German economy and made it much more difficult for Germany -- even then the most important economic unit in Europe -- to fully recover from the war.

It was only a matter of time before the German government defaulted on its reparations payments. When it did so in 1922, the French responded by invading Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr. This in turn led to a campaign of passive resistance among German workers and the decision by the German government to continue to pay them, leading to hyper-inflation and the collapse of the German economy.

Even though the United States had rejected both reparations and the Treaty of Versailles, it was the US that ultimately came to Germany's and Europe's rescue in response to the 1923 "Ruhr crisis." Under the terms of the Dawes (1924) and later Young (1929) plans, the total reparations due was reduced to 112 billion gold marks, and millions of private American dollars were pumped into the German economy to stabilize its currency and make it possible for Germany to pay her reparations. This in turn made it possible for the British and the French to make their war debt payments to the United States.

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This inherently unstable system worked fine so long as American investors were willing to keep the flow of dollars moving into Germany. But when the bottom fell out of the US stock market in 1929 the flow stopped, the German economy once again collapse,; and with unemployment soaring, the popularity of the Nazi Party rose dramatically. In 1928, for example, the Nazis held only 12 seats in the Reichstag, but in 1930 they polled 107 seats and in 1932 they took 230, making Hitler's party the largest in the German Parliament. Within a matter of months, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and the fate of the world would never be the same.

None of this happened overnight. It took some time for these events to unfold, which is why in hindsight the actions of the governments involved look so disturbing. With Germany experiencing a rapid economic decline after the 1929 crash, for example, the allies offered to reduce the reparations demands, but only if the United States would be willing to do the same with respect to the war debts. The Hoover Administration, however, refused to do so, even going so far as to insist repeatedly that there was no link between the two issues. Hoover did offer -- and instigate -- a one year moratorium on all inter-governmental debt in 1931, but this was too little too late. Moreover, to make matters worse, the US by this point had instigated the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, making it even harder for the European nations to earn the dollars they needed to pay off their American debts. By 1931, the situation had reached crisis proportions, and in response the British and many other smaller nations abandoned the gold standard and depreciated their currencies in an attempt to promote their exports and revive their domestic economies. This in turn hurt American exports and placed further downward pressure on domestic American prices, deepening an already bleak economic picture.

When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, there were great hopes in London and Paris that he would be much more sympathetic to the British and French desire to reduce or even eliminate the war debts. This may have been the case privately, but the US Congress was in no mood to compromise. So the matter was left unresolved, and as the Depression continued, eventually the payments ceased.

As for the German reparations payments, they were suspended in 1931 and were not recognized as legitimate under the Nazis. But in 1953, the West German government agreed at a conference in London to resume paying its foreign bond obligations from the inter-war years. By the early 1980s, the entire principal on these bonds had been repaid. Also included in the London agreement was an understanding that Germany would not have to pay the interest on this foreign debt until it had achieved unification. With this accomplished in 1990, Germany began paying off the interest in annual installments, making the final payment of 70 million Euros last Sunday.

The experience of the inter-war years -- including the determination that World War II was caused largely by economic forces -- helped inspire the creation of the American-led postwar multilateral economic system based on freer trade and the free movement of capital that for the most part served the world well. But the nationalistic "beggar-thy-neighbor" impulses of the interwar years have not disappeared and are clearly on the rise. Witness, for example, the tensions between China and the US over China's refusal to raise the value of its currency (what Treasury Secretary Geithner calls "competitive non-appreciation"); the response of the US House of Representatives, which just passed a bill targeting Chinese imports; the widespread speculation that these tensions and others among the world's emerging economies will lead to an all-out currency war; and the emerging anti-free trade stance among members the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party (61% of Tea Party members say they are opposed to free trade).

The experience of the 1920s and 30s taught our parents' generation that economic nationalism is a double-edged sword. Recent events seem to indicate this is one lesson this generation has either forgotten or is prepared to reject, with unknown consequences for the future.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute.

Andy Kroll paints an intimate portrait of what it means to be unemployed in the US.

Sometime in early June -- he's not exactly sure which day -- Rick Rembold joined history. That he doesn't remember comes as little surprise: Who wants their name etched into the record books for not having a job?

For Rembold, that day in June marked six months since he'd last pulled a steady paycheck, at which point his name joined the rapidly growing list of American workers deemed "long-term unemployed" by the Department of Labor. In the worst jobs crisis in generations, the ranks of Rembolds, stranded on the sidelines, have exploded by over 400% -- from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million this June. The extraordinary growth of this jobless underclass is a harbinger of prolonged pain for the American economy.

This summer, I set out to explore just why long-term unemployment had risen to historic levels -- and stumbled across Rembold. A 56-year-old resident of Mishawaka, Indiana, he caught the unnerving mix of frustration, anger, and helplessness voiced by so many other unemployed workers I'd spoken to. "I lie awake at night with acid indigestion worrying about how I'm going to survive," he said in a brief bio kept by the National Employment Law Project, which is how I found him. I called him up, and we talked about his languishing career, as well as his childhood and family. But a few phone calls, I realized, weren't enough. In early August I hopped a plane to northern Indiana.

In job terms, my timing couldn't have been better. I arrived around lunchtime, and was driving through downtown South Bend, an unremarkable cluster of buildings awash in gray and brown and brick, when my cell phone rang. Rembold's breathless voice was on the other end. "Sorry I didn't pick up earlier, man, but a friend just called and tipped me off about a place up near the airport. I'm fillin' up my bike and headin' up there right now." I told him I'd meet him there, hung a sharp U-turn, and sped north.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot of a modest-sized aircraft parts manufacturer tucked into a quiet business park. Ford and Chevy trucks filled the lot, most backed in. Rembold roared up soon after on his '99 Suzuki motorcycle. Barrel-chested with a thick neck, his short black hair was flecked with gray, and he was deeply tanned from long motorcycle rides with his girlfriend Terri. "They didn't even advertise this job," he told me after a hearty handshake. Not unless you count the inconspicuous sign out front, a jobless man's oasis in the blinding heat: "NOW HIRING: Bench Inspector."

His black leather portfolio in hand, Rembold took a two-sided application from a woman who greeted us inside the tiny lobby. He filled it out in minutes, the phone numbers, names, dates, and addresses committed to memory, handed it to the secretary, and in a polite but firm tone asked to speak with someone from management. While we waited, he pointed out the old Studebaker factories in a black-and-white sketch of nineteenth century South Bend on the wall, launching into a Cliffs Notes history of industry in this once-bustling corner of the Midwest.

A manager finally emerges with Rembold's application in hand. Rembold rushes to explain away the three jobs he had listed in the "previous employers" section -- stints at a woodworking company, motorcycle shop, and local payday lender. They're not, he assures the man, indicative of his skills; they're not who he is. You see, he rushes to add, he's been in manufacturing practically his entire life, a hard and loyal worker who made his way up from the shop floor to salecs and then to management. That kind of experience won't fit in three blank spots on a one-page form. Unswayed, the manager thanks him formulaically for applying.

If the company's interested, the manager says -- and it feels like a kiss-off even to me -- they'll be in touch, and before we know it we're back out in the smothering heat of an Indiana summer. Rembold tucks his portfolio into one of the Suzuki's leather saddlebags. "Well, that's pretty standard," he says, his tone remarkably matter-of-fact. "At least I got to talk to somebody. You're lucky to get that anymore."

A Perfect Storm Hits American Labor

The numbers tell so much of the story. The 6.76 million Americans -- or 46% of the entire unemployed labor force -- counted as long-term unemployed in June were the most since 1948, when the statistic was first recorded, and more than double the previous record of 3 million in the recession of the early 1980s. (The numbers have since dipped slightly, with a total of 6.2 million long-term unemployed in August.) These are people who, despite dozens of rejections, leave phone messages, send emails, tweak their cover letters, and toy with resume templates in Microsoft Word, all in the search for a job.

Not counted in this figure are so-called "discouraged workers," including plenty of former searchers who have remained on the unemployment sidelines for six months or more. In August of this year, 1.1 million Americans had simply stopped looking and so officially dropped out of the workforce. They are essentially not considered worth counting when the subject of unemployment comes up. Nonetheless, that 1.1 million figure represents an increase of 352,000 since 2009. In effect, the real long-term unemployment figure now may be closer to 7.5 million Americans.

So who are these unfortunate or unlucky people? Long-term unemployment, research shows, doesn't discriminate: no age, race, ethnicity, or educational level is immune. According to federal data, however, the hardest hit when it comes to long-term unemployment are older workers -- middle aged and beyond, folks like Rick Rembold who can see retirement on the horizon but planned on another decade or more of work. Given the increasing claims of age discrimination in this recession, older Americans suffering longer bouts of joblessness may not in itself be so surprising. That education seemingly works against anyone in this older cohort is. Nearly half of the long-term unemployed who are 45 or older have "some college," a bachelor's degree, or more. By contrast, those with no education at all make up just 15% of this older category. In other words, if you're older and well educated, the outlook is truly grim.

As for the causes of long-term unemployment, there's the obvious answer: there simply aren't enough jobs. Before the Great Recession, there were 1.5 workers in the U.S. for every job slot; today, that ratio is 4.8 to one. Put another way, with normal growth instead of a recession, we'd have 10 million more jobs than we currently do. Closing that gap would require adding 300,000 jobs every month for the next five years. In August 2010, the economy shed 54,000 jobs. You do the math.

Worse yet, if you imagine five workers queued up for that single position, the longer you're unemployed, the further back you stand. Economists have found that long-term unemployment dims a worker's prospects with each passing day. "This pattern suggests that the very-long-term unemployed will be the last group to benefit from an economic recovery," Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California-Berkeley, told Congress in June.

But when you consider the plight of the long-term unemployed, don't just think jobs. The 2008 recession was a housing-driven crisis, thanks to the rise of subprime mortgage lending, government policy, and greed. As a result, 11 million borrowers -- or nearly 23% of all homeowners with a mortgage -- now find themselves "underwater": that is, owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. Negative equity at those levels creates what Harvard economist Lawrence Katz calls a "geographic lock-in effect," stifling jobs recovery. Typically, American workers are a mobile bunch, willing to bounce from one city to the next for new jobs, but not when homeowners are staying put to avoid selling their underwater houses for a loss.

Another factor in the explosion of long-term unemployment lies in a shift away from temporary layoffs. In the recessions of 1975, 1980, and 1982, 20% of unemployed workers had been only temporarily laid off; as of August of this year, just 10% had. In their heyday, automakers and steel companies laid off workers as demand dipped, but backstopped by powerful labor unions, those workers were regularly recalled as demand and production revved up again. No more. Now, if you're long-term unemployed, you're undoubtedly trying to find a new job with a new employer, a more daunting process. Add it all up and you have Rick Rembold.

"Feast or Famine" in RV Land

Rembold calls himself a Democrat -- "not the peace sign, hit-the-bong type," he hastens to add, but "a tear-off-your-head-and-shit-down-your-neck Democrat." He can't stomach Glenn Beck or talk radio here in the Land of Limbaugh, and with equal zeal he watches MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and FX's "Sons of Anarchy," a gritty, violent series about outlaw motorcycle gangs.

It was a Friday morning, and we were in Rembold's kitchen, drinking coffee and talking politics. He wore jeans and a black polo shirt, and paced as he spoke. Ideas and frustrations poured out of him like water from an open spigot; the man had a lot on his mind. The night before, I had asked him to show me around the area, especially the economic engine that sustains it: the recreational vehicle, or RV, industry. Once the coffee ran dry, we piled into my car and set off.

Cities such as Elkhart and Middlebury and Mishawaka and Wakarusa are the cradle of the RV industry. Headquartered here are major manufacturers like Jayco and Forest River. At its peak, northern Indiana churned out three-quarters of all RVs on the road -- motor homes and fifth-wheels, pop-up campers, travel trailers, and toy haulers. Producing them was grueling work, but you could fashion a middle-class lifestyle out of what it paid. "Workin' in the RV industry, they'll work you to death," Rembold said. "People would literally be sprintin' from one place to the next with power tools in their hands."

Then came "the Panic of '08," as one RV salesman put it to me. Teetering banks choked off consumer lending as credit markets froze. The downturn pummeled the industry. In 2009, sales of fifth-wheels, a smaller trailer you hitch to a truck or SUV, plummeted by 30%, travel trailers by 23.5%, campers by 28%. Manufacturers like Jayco, Monaco Coach, and others collectively laid off thousands, and the region's unemployment rate spiked by more than 10% in a year. When a newly elected Barack Obama arrived in Elkhart in February 2009 to tout his stimulus plan, the jobless rate was 15.3%; a month later, it reached 18.9%, more than twice the national rate. At one point, Elkhart County, with a population of 200,000, was shedding 95 jobs a day.

In the 1990s and first years of the new century, RV manufacturers couldn't hire enough workers. They ran ads in regional and national newspapers looking for more bodies. "We couldn't even get people to drive over from South Bend to work in Elkhart," a sales rep for Jayco told me.

By the time I arrived, though, the industry had left its feast years, hit the famine ones fast, and was showing the first signs of crawling back. Driving through Middlebury, a town of 3,200 east of Elkhart, I saw a few carrier trucks hustling in or out of plants, some full employee parking lots, and rows of gleaming new RVs dotting the green landscape like herds of boxy cattle.

Whether the industry will ever fully recover, however, is unclear. The manufacturers I spoke to were optimistic about future sales. "Despite the logic of what's going on in the economy, the buyers are still there," said Jerimiah Borkowski, a spokesman for Thor Motor Coach. But a 2009 analysis by Indiana University's Business Research Center projected that by 2013 annual RV shipments still won't have returned to their 2006 peak. "I personally don't think it'll ever rebound to pre-2008 levels," says Bill Dawson, vice president and general manager of Clean Seal Inc., a South Bend-based supplier of parts to the RV industry. Dawson points to industry contractions -- Thor's $209 million acquisition of Heartland RV, the Damon Motor Coach-Four Winds merger, as well as numerous factory closings -- and says, "Fewer players mean fewer units and fewer people making them."

Rembold knows the RV industry's ebb and flow all too well. He's lived in its shadow for the majority of his working career, including 18 years with Architectural Wood Company (AWC), an Elkhart-based manufacturer of wood products used to outfit RVs and conversion vans. He's made handcrafted tables, faceplates, valences, and overhead consoles, usually from oak or maple, finishing them with the gloss that gives Kimball grand pianos and Fender guitars their shine.

But by the 1990s and 2000s, his line of work looked to be headed the way of the 8-track tape. The conversion van industry was sinking. RV manufacturers had begun replacing wood with cheaper plastics and vinyl-wrapped plywood. (At an RV show we visited, Rembold could step inside a vehicle and determine by smell alone if the manufacturer used the real thing or not.) Orders plummeted at AWC. By early 2006, the company's financial health was so dire that the owner, a good friend of Rembold's, let him go. A few years later, the company itself folded.

Rembold then caromed from one job to the next: selling used cars and motorcycles, driving a semi truck, working behind six inches of bulletproof glass as a teller at Check$mart. He briefly ended up back in RVs, supervising employees sewing tents for campers, and then, last winter, temped at a struggling wood shop. That was his last job. After the holidays, he was never called back.

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Like millions in his predicament, Rembold knows his chances of finding a decent-paying job doing what he loves decrease with each temporary, non-manufacturing job he's taken. What doesn't fit on a resume -- and so frustrates him most -- is his adaptability, if only he could convince an employer of it. College degree or not, certification or not, he insists, he's always adapted to new settings. "Could I do construction? Hell, yeah, I could do it. I could measure in metric, in standard; I'd correct cutting mistakes, do it all. I just can't get anyone to let me do it."

As we talked, the RV plants gave way to lush farmland and we found ourselves driving through Amish country, sharing quiet two-lane roads with horse-drawn buggies. By early afternoon we rolled into the town of Topeka (pop. 1,200), past the Seed and Stove store and the Do-It Better hardware shop. Then Rembold's cell phone buzzed, a rare break in the conversation. It was his daughter, Angie, 28, the youngest of his three kids.

He listened, then yanked off his sunglasses. "You what?"

Angie managed the Check$mart in Goshen, the check-cashing outfit Rembold once worked for, and she was good at her job, Rembold had told me earlier. Now she was agitated, talking so loudly that I caught bits and pieces of the conversation over the din of the radio. Something about a bonus owed that she didn't receive. When Rembold abruptly hung up, he muttered, "Jesus H. Christ."

Later, over lunch at what looked to be Topeka's lone diner, he explained that Angie planned to quit her job over the unpaid bonus. After a full morning telling me about the nightmare of being out of work, he looked stunned. "You'd think she'd have learned from my situation. I don't think she realizes how her life is going to change."

The Trauma of Long-Term Unemployment

It's hard, even for the long-term unemployed, to grasp just how drastically life can change without work. Studying past recessions to discover just what does happen, researchers often focus on the collapse of the steel industry in Pennsylvania in the late 1970s that would turn a once-thriving region into a landscape of shuttered factories and ghost towns. Eighty thousand people worked in steel in the 1940s; by 1987, 4,000 remained.

In one study, male Pennsylvania workers with high seniority experienced a 50% to 100% spike in mortality rate in the first year after job loss. The life expectancies of those laid off after age 40 decreased by one to one-and-a-half years. In the long run, these laid-off Pennsylvanians suffered a 15% to 20% reduction in earnings. Those hardest hit in terms of lifelong earnings, economists found, were not low-skilled laborers or highly skilled wealthy elites, but workers who had managed to forge a middle-class lifestyle.

Suicide rates also increase, researchers have found, when unemployment rises. (In Elkhart County, near where Rembold lives, suicides exceeded the annual average by 40% last year.)

The 1980s recession in Pennsylvania was no outlier either, economic researchers have discovered, and the effects of long-term unemployment spread well beyond directly afflicted workers. In the short run, for instance, a child whose parent loses his or her job is 15% more likely to repeat a grade year in school, according to University of California-Davis economists Ann Huff Stevens and Jessamyn Schaller. This is especially true for children with less-educated parents.

Over their lifetime, the children of jobless fathers earn, on average, 9% less each year than similar children without laid-off dads, and are more likely to receive unemployment insurance and social welfare support at some point in their lifetimes. New research also suggests that the children of laid-off parents may have lower homeownership rates and higher divorce rates.

"I'm Not Competing With Some College Kid"

In the early evening, Rembold and I holed up in his office, a small room off the main hallway with a computer, two desks, and countless framed photos. Rembold clicked open a folder on his Internet browser labeled "Careers" and walked me through his daily online job-hunting routine. He checks half-a-dozen job boards regularly, though openings tend to pay only in the $8- to $10-an-hour range. He rejects most of those out of hand.

"Wouldn't that be better than no job at all?" I ask.

Rembold gnaws on the question. "I can't afford my home at $8 or $10 an hour," he finally replies. Right now, he's getting by on unemployment checks, a small inheritance from his mother that's rapidly dwindling, and loans from family members. Still, he'd rather keep trolling the job boards in the hopes of finding something offering a living wage. "I've got a mortgage to pay, for Christ's sake," he told me. The few openings he sees with good pay, however, involve odd hours, dusk-to-dawn shifts that would mean he'd almost never see Terri, whose schedule at an aluminum company in Elkhart is early morning to mid-afternoon.

And then, under the dollar signs lurks something else: self-respect. Unlike his father, Rembold never went to college, and doesn't consider himself too good for service-sector jobs. But he visibly agonizes over the fact that, as a 56-year-old man with decades of experience, he's competing with people half his age for low-wage jobs. After all, as a machine operator fresh out of high school at White Farm Equipment, he earned $8.64 an hour. That was 1976. Adjusted for inflation, that's equivalent to $42.42 today. No wonder the man's reluctant to flip burgers or trim hedges for $9 an hour.

His friends have suggested selling his house and moving somewhere smaller and cheaper, maybe renting for a while, but that's the last thing he wants. It's that self-respect again. He's already sold off one motorcycle and various musical instruments, and he and Terri now skip the big vacations that were part of their past life. Which isn't to say that Rembold currently lives like a monk. He still has the big screen in the basement, the DVD collection, the video-game systems for when the grandkids visit, a life's worth of possessions from decades of earning good money. "Why should you have to give up your home?" he wanted to know. "It's so unbelievable to me that I don't even want to think about it. I'm in denial."

A Lost Generation?

What's to be done for people like Rick Rembold? As in most economic debates, the answer to this question divides economists and policymakers. On the left are those who lobby for more aid to jobless Americans, including another extension of unemployment insurance beyond the present cut-off date of 99 weeks. (In normal times, laid-off workers once got 26 weeks of unemployment insurance.) Some Democrats in the Senate had hoped to extend unemployment insurance by another 20 weeks up to 119 weeks, an effort spearheaded by Senator Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) that ultimately failed last week in the face of Republican opposition. That same camp supports a one-time "reemployment bonus," a lump-sum payment that unemployed workers would receive to reward them for finding a new job and leaving the unemployment rolls.

Another idea gaining traction in policy circles is "wage insurance," in which the government would supplement the income of workers rehired at lower-paying jobs. Consider Rembold who, in his prime, earned $25 an hour. He says can't live on a $10-an-hour job, but if that were to become $12 or $15 an hour, thanks to a government subsidy, he'd be much more interested.

More conservative voices believe cutting jobless benefits -- a bitter pill, to be sure -- will force people back into the workforce. The Rembolds of America will then scramble harder and take those low-wage jobs faster. Of course, those who can't find work at all will be left adrift with no safety net. What's more, the cost of such cuts to taxpayers might actually prove higher, economists note, because without those benefits the jobless might instead apply for disability or other support programs and give up the search altogether.

Ideally, of course, employers and governments should avoid widespread layoffs altogether. One option sometimes suggested would be a "work-share" program. Imagine a factory of 100 workers with a boss looking to cut costs. Instead of laying off 25 workers, he would reduce all of his workers' hours by 25%. The government would then step in to fill the earnings gap. Think of it as the equivalent of collecting unemployment before you're laid off, a preventive measure to avoid the trauma -- to income, health, family -- of job loss.

None of this is likely to happen soon which is little consolation for the long-term unemployed like Rembold. Unfortunately, there are few proven solutions to their situation. Job retraining programs for unemployed workers are all the rage these days, touted by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, and President Obama as a transition to a new line of work. But a 2008 study commissioned by the Labor Department found minimal-to-no gains for 160,000 workers who went through retraining, concluding that the "ultimate gains from participation are small or nonexistent."

In the end, facing an economy that may never again generate in such quantity the sorts of "middle class" jobs Rembold was used to, what we may be seeing is the creation of a graying class of permanently unemployed (or underemployed) Americans, a genuine lost generation who will never recover from the recession of 2008. As Mike Konczal and Arjun Jayadev of the Roosevelt Institute, a left-leaning think tank, recently wrote, unemployed workers today are more likely to abandon the workforce than find work -- something never before seen in four decades' worth of labor data. "These workers need targeted intervention," they concluded, "before they become completely lost to the normal labor market."

"All I Need Is One Chance"

I first noticed Rembold's tic on Sunday, my last day in Indiana. Out of nowhere, without provocation, he'd suddenly say things like "Man, I just need a job," or "All I need is a chance," or "I wanna work, make stuff with my hands." He'd been filling the lulls in our conversations with these little outbursts, symptoms, I assumed, of the worry and anxiety that never left his side. Which is why I called a few weeks after my visit, hoping for good news.

And there was, after a fashion. Angie, his daughter, had ended up sticking with Check$mart, much to his relief. But for him, the leads were sparser than ever. "There's this neighbor here," he said, "her son's a shift manager at the Walmart, so he's gonna see what they might have." He also mentioned an electronic wire and cable manufacturer with openings in Bremen, a half-hour south. He'd recently applied there for the third time this year. This time around, he went on, he planned to march in and demand the interview he'd never gotten. "I mean, what's it take to get in to see someone there?" he asked me.

Rembold doesn't have time on his side. Unlike the now-famous "99ers," the folks who received nearly two years' worth of unemployment benefits, his will expire sometime this winter, short of the 99-week mark. He's not sure what he'll do by then if he can't find work. Maybe take one of those $8-an-hour jobs after all. For now, though, he's just checking the job boards each morning, shipping off resumes and cover letters, firing up the Suzuki, chasing leads.

I asked if he still had any hope left that something good would happen. "I don't know," he replied. " 'Course if ya don't go, ya don't know."

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. This post originally appeared on Tomgram and research support was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

Does the math really add up on these potential solutions to our economic problems?

A number of economists of the liberal Keynesian persuasion have been arguing recently that dollar devaluation is an important step in moving us back toward full employment. In principle, of course, a cheaper dollar should raise US exports and lower US imports. But what's missing from many of these arguments is a concrete, quantitative analysis of how much a lower dollar would raise demand for American goods.

In the interest of starting a discussion, here is a very rough first cut. There are four parameters to worry about, two each for imports and exports: how much a given change in the dollar moves prices in the destination country (the passthrough rate), and how much demand for traded goods responds to a change in price (the price elasticity). We can't observe these relationships directly, of course, so we have to estimate them based on historical data on trade flows and exchange rates. But once we assign values to them, it's straightforward how to calculate the effect of a given exchange rate change. And the values reported in published studies suggest that the level of the dollar is a relatively minor factor in US unemployment.

For passthrough, estimates are quite consistent that dollar changes are passed through more or less one for one to US export prices, but considerably less to US import prices. (In other words, US exporters set prices based solely on domestic costs, but exporters to the US "price to market".) The OECD's global macro model uses a value of 0.33 for import passthrough at a two-year horizon; a simple OLS regression of changes in import prices on the trade-weighted exchange rate yields basically the same value. Estimates of import price elasticity are almost always less than unity. Here are a few: Kwack et al (2007), -0.93; Crane, Crowley and Quayyum (2007), -0.47 to -0.63; Mann and Plück (2005), -0.28; Marquez (1990), -0.63 to -0.92. (Studies that use the real exchange rate rather than import prices generally find import elasticities between -0.1 and -0.25, which is consistent with a passthrough rate of about one-third.) So a reasonable assumption for import price elasticity would be about -0.75; there is no support for a value beyond -1. Estimated export elasticities vary more widely, but most fall between -0.5 and -1.

So let's use values near the midpoint of the published estimates. Let's assume import passthrough of 0.33, import price elasticity of -0.75, export passthrough of 1 and price elasticity of -1. And let's assume initial trade flows at their average levels of the 2000s -- imports of 15 percent of GDP and exports at 10.5 percent of GDP. Given those assumptions, what happens if the dollar falls by 20 percent? The answer is, the US trade deficit shrinks by 1.9 percent of GDP.

That might sound like a lot. But keep in mind, these are long-run elasticities -- in general, it takes as much as two years for price movements to have their full effect on trade. And the fall in the dollar also can't happen overnight, at least not without severe disruptions to financial markets. So we are talking about an annual boost to demand of somewhere between 0.5 and 1.0 percent of GDP for two to three years. And then, of course, the stimulus ends unless the dollar keeps falling. This is less than half the size of the stimulus passed last January. (Although to be fair, increased demand for tradables should have a higher multiplier than the mix of direct spending, transfers and tax cuts that made up the Obama stimulus.) The employment effect would probably be of the same magnitude -- a reduction of the unemployment rate by between 0.5 and 1.0 points.

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So it's not a trivial effect, but it's also not the main thing we should be worried about if we want to get back to broadly-shared prosperity. We should remember, too, that a policy of boosting US demand by increasing net exports has costs that a policy of boosting domestic demand does not.

And what about China? At least as often as we hear calls for a lower dollar, we hear calls for China to allow its currency to rise. How much could that help?

Unfortunately, there aren't as many good recent studies of bilateral trade elasticities between the US and China. And the BEA's published series for Chinese import prices only goes back to 2003, which isn't enough for reliable estimates. But common sense can get us quite a ways here. In recent years, US imports from China have run around 2 percent of GDP, and US exports to China a bit under 0.5 percent. So even if we assume that (1) a change in the nominal exchange rate is reflected one for one in the real exchange rate, i.e. that it doesn't affect Chinese prices or wages at all; (2) a change in the real exchange rate is passed one for one into prices of Chinese imports in the US; (3) Chinese goods compete only with American-made goods, and not with those of other exporters; and (4) the price elasticity of US imports from China is an implausibly high 1.5; then a 20 percent appreciation of the Chinese currency only provides a boost to US demand of less than one half of one percent of GDP in total, spread out over several years.

And of course, those are all wildly optimistic assumptions. A recent Deutsche Bank report uses an estimate of -0.6 for the exchange rate elasticity of Chinese exports. They don't give any estimates for US-China flows specifically, but given the well-established empirical fact that US imports are unusually exchange-rate inelastic, we have to assume that the number for Chinese exports to the US is substantially smaller than for Chinese exports overall. Consistent with that, my own simple error-correction model, using 1993-2010 data and the relative CPI-deflated bilateral exchange rate, gives an exchange rate elasticity of US imports from China of -0.17. If the real figure is in that range, then a Chinese appreciation of 20 percent will reduce our imports from China by just 0.03 percent of GDP -- and of course much of even that tiny demand shift will be to goods from other low-wage exporters. This last point makes a focus on the Chinese peg particularly problematic as an explanation of US unemployment. If you are talking about reducing the value of the dollar against our trading partners as a whole, any resulting shift away from imports has to be to domestic goods. But presumably the closest substitutes for Chinese imports are usually other imports, not stuff made in the USA.

These are rough calculations and only intended to start a conversation. But it's a conversation we very much need to have. Before we launch a trade war with China for the sake of American workers, we need more concrete answers on the size of the potential gains.

Historically-minded critics of China and other surplus countries often quote Keynes' writings from the 1930s and '40s, with their emphasis on the importance of "creditor adjustment". The implication is that it's China's responsibility to reduce its net exports. But this is a misleading reading of Keynes. In fact, his concern was only ever to ensure that no country was prevented from pursuing full employment by the need to earn foreign exchange. The US, as the supplier of the world reserve currency, cannot face a balance of payments constraint; if we fail to pursue full employment, we have no one to blame but ourselves. If Keynes were alive today, I suspect he would be telling American policymakers to forget about China and focus all their efforts on boosting US demand -- by public investment in infrastructure, by unconventional monetary stimulus, by paying people to dig holes and fill them up again if need be. Because he knew that the only reason to worry about the trade balance was to gain the freedom to pursue "a policy of an autonomous rate of interest, unimpeded by international preoccupations, and of a national investment program directed to the optimum level of domestic employment, which is twice blessed in the sense that it helps ourselves and our neighbors at the same time."

J. W. Mason is a graduate student in economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A version of this post previously appeared at The Slack Wire.