Nearly three years since the ostensible end of the recession, the United States is still beset by over 15 percent underemployment—millions of Americans who would like to work full time and either can’t find jobs, or can only find part time work. We know from a large body of research that unemployment and underemployment have many negative consequences, not only financial but physical and mental. But this plague of underemployment exists alongside the corresponding problem of over-employment.

I think these do a fantastic job of articulating one of the underlying reasons i find both political parties so (a) pathetic and (b) frustrating. Neither party articulates a vision for what an America that provides "middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion" to the working class would look like under current global economic and technological conditions. (I think that's a big part of the explanation that Democrats need to hear, by the way, for why lower-income/working-class "red staters" consistently vote in a manner that Democrats perceive to be contrary to that class's inherent economic interests -- a Democratic party which is essentially neo-liberal and under the sway of professionalism cannot articulate a convincing alternative to a Republican vision whose appeal is primarily "let's make things the way they were", even if that Republican vision doesn't articulate an accurate causation for the disappearance of those conditions.)

Not sure this is correct. While the proposals to enhance employment in the software industry at least seem reasonable, there's still an issue of scale -- while manufacturing may be way down from its peak at over 19 million (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/business/us-manufacturing-is-a-bright-spot-for-the-economy.html?_r=1), it still employs nearly 12 million people; the software industry, 1 million (http://www.bsa.org/country/Public%20Policy/~/media/Files/Policy/Security/General/sw_factsfigures.ashx).

Things got so bad that in 2008, Forbes Magazine called Lancaster the most vulnerable place in America

Problem here: if "many" in the key graph is more like "few"

"Shorter job tenure is associated with a new era of insecurity, volatility, and risk. It's part of the same employment picture as the increase in part-time, freelance, and contract work; mass layoffs and buyouts; and "creative destruction" within industries. All these changes put more pressure on the individual--to provide our own health care, bridge gaps in income with savings, manage our own retirement planning, and invest in our own education to keep skills marketable and up to date. Financial commitments like homeownership or starting a family are a much tougher proposition when one, you can't expect to stay in a place for long and two, you can't expect to ever earn more in real terms than you do at age 40, as recent surveys at Payscale.com suggest."

"And yet, many members of the American workforce, Hasler included, aren't pining for a return to the era of the long job."

Also: health care arrangements not flexible...

We have been living in a society where debts, rather than rights, have been the major means for accessing basic social goods like housing, education, and health care.

"The impossible quest for that ersatz authenticity is wearing us down. In the absence of sustaining, reciprocal, non-schematized relations with others, however, the self, as the Invisible Committee asserts, begins to break down: “The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get.” Even though consumerism reifies and exalts individuality, it is ultimately self-annihilating. Rather than losing ourselves in the flow of socially meaningful and useful activity, we are congealed in the aspic of our stultifying self-consciousness, replaying strategies of competitive selfhood, disguising ploys for attention as disinterested solicitude. The ceaseless cynicism is corrosive."

...3-D printing, and automated manufacturing at a small-distributed scale in other ways. This is a hobbyist phenomenon right now where you have a machine that takes some gloop, that connects to your computer, and then the gloop is printed out into something you might like, like a new Frisbee, or coat hanger, or clarinet mouthpiece, whatever it is. As this gets more and more sophisticated, it becomes possible that more and more things can be manufactured onsite instead of made in China or wherever, and then moved over through a huge transportation network...<br />
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Once again, whenever you improve efficiency, when you save money, it's only the same thing as making money if you're already rich. If there are people who aren't rich enough to benefit from that, it just makes them poorer because they have less to do, and less ways to earn money.

(Note also that the top 1% control somewhere between 35-40% of the nation's wealth.)

That’s not what the left wants.  We want to give people the chance to do something else with their lives, something besides merely tending to it, without having to take a 30-year detour on Wall Street to get there. The way to do that is not to immerse people even more in the ways and means of the market, but to give them time and space to get out of it. That’s what a good welfare state, real social democracy, does: rather than being consumed by life, it allows you to make your life. Freely. One less bell to answer, not one more.

Republicans are resistant. And Democrats are too cowed to counter much, given polls that show many Americans believe Mr. Obama’s 2009-10 stimulus package did not work, despite studies to the contrary.<br />
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A Democratic Congressional adviser, granted anonymity to discuss party deliberations, said: “We’re at a loss to figure out a way to articulate the argument in a way that doesn’t get us pegged as tax-and-spenders.”<br />
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In a column in The Washington Post on Friday, Bill Gross, who runs the giant bond-trading firm Pimco, lashed out at Republicans and “co-opted Democrats” for setting aside widely accepted economic theory.<br />
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“An anti-Keynesian, budget-balancing immediacy imparts a constrictive noose around whatever demand remains alive and kicking,” he wrote. “Washington hassles over debt ceilings instead of job creation in the mistaken belief that a balanced budget will produce a balanced economy. It will not.”

The essential players are found at the base, not the apex, of the economic pyramid

"That's how student radicals think -- not conservatives."

whether your problem is alienation or lack of good jobs, it’s hard to present manufacturing as the solution unless you’re willing to take a radical stand against labor-saving technology, and in favor of lower material standards of living.

Using data from 1979 to 2009, the authors demonstrate that renting was the superior investment strategy for most of the past 30 years. Counterintuitive as the finding may be to some, it is actually quite logical. Unless someone possesses the cash necessary to buy a residence, he or she will be renting one way or another. The choice is between renting the property directly or instead renting the capital necessary to buy the property.