Orwell on Unemployment

From Wigan Pier:

But there is no doubt about the deadening, debilitating effect of unemployment upon everybody, married or single, and upon men more than upon women. The best intellects will not stand up against it. Once or twice it has happened to me to meet unemployed men of genuine literary ability; there are others whom I haven’t met but whose work I occasionally see in the magazines. Now and again, at long intervals, these men will produce an article or a short story which is quite obviously better than most of the stuff that gets whooped up by the blurb-reviewers. Why, then, do they make so little use of their talents? They have all the leisure in the world; why don’t they sit down and write books? Because to write books you need not only comfort and solitude—and solitude is never easy to obtain in a working class home—you also need peace of mind. You can’t settle to anything, you can’t command the spirit of hope in which everything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

Welcome to America's future, ladies and gentlemen. The longer this nonsense lasts, the worse it gets. And with the choice of a Democratic president that—according to Suskind's latest—doesn't understand the central importance of aggregate demand on the economy vs. a Republican opposition that devoutly wishes that the long-term unemployed would just crawl into a hole and die quietly, it's likely to be getting worse for a good long time.