Recessions are always painful for those who lose their jobs. For most, life goes on sooner or later: the economy recovers and they get a job similar to the one that they had held before. But for others life does not go back to normal. Their job turns
out to be gone for good. Skills and experience that were once valuable are no longer, and if they get another job it is not as good. Think of the former steel workers stripping in The Full Monty. Economists call this “hysteresis”: it means that a recession can be more than a cyclical phenomenon, and have long-lasting effects.
This happened in the early 1980s, when the recession increased the number of industrial workers losing their jobs so much that the economy could not generate enough new jobs for all of them.
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