The Recession Ended! Really?

Julia Klein of the Washington Post recently wrote a review about Barbara Gerson's book, "Down the Up Escalator" but I  have issues with both the reivew and the novel.

Klein writes, “Unfortunately, “Down the Up Escalator” appears too late to bring us news and too early to say anything definitive about the recession’s longer-term effects. The problem is not just that the recession officially ended more than three years ago, in 2009. Certainly its economic fallout, including high unemployment and underemployment and millions of underwater mortgages, persists. But housing prices are rising again, and the stock market has reached record peaks. Garson’s title, catchy though it is, should have been tweaked to signal the passage of time. The escalator has stalled; we’re stuck in the jobless recovery now.”

Walk down any Main Street and hundreds will tell you the receission is NOT over. Yes were stuck in a "jobless recovery" but its so much more than that.

While I have yet to read the book, Klein states that [Gerson] “finds her economic victims largely cushioned from true poverty. Thanks to unemployment insurance and the two-income household, “ ‘poor’ Americans,” she asserts, “are surprisingly rich.”

I would like to know who she interviewed and where they are from,  because I personally don not see that. My unemployed New Yorker friends are double or tripling up on roommates - because they have no  family remaining, and they still do believe  NYC is where they can best put their degrees and experience to work. While others, like myself, are unable to have enough money to just pack it up and go west, they haveve opted to stick around and make do. (Not everyone is as lucky like a select few where mom and dad cover their rent and insurance bills - the rest of us live in the real world, where we have always supported OURSELVES!)

Being unemployed in NYC is not something any one wants to do by choice. The few of us who have gotten part-time jobs and have swallowed way more than our pride...have accept jobs at less than half our salaries, in fields none of us ever expected to be in, doing jobs we simply never imagined. None of this by is choice, each and every one of us would work full-time in a heartbeat and walk away from our unemployment status and even our unemployment insurance checks (if any of us are still actually still collecting).