October 1950: American steelworker Charlie Grapentine drives his Dodge car to work. He earns 320 dollars per month for a 40 hour week at the United States Steel Corporation works in Youngstown, Ohio. His salary supports his wife Josephine and their two children Charles and Nancy.
When I wrote about the crisis of unemployment in Europe , I received a great deal of feedback. Europeans agreed that this is the core problem while Americans argued that the United States has the same problem, asserting that U.S. unemployment is twice as high as the government's official unemployment rate. My counterargument is that unemployment in the United States is not a problem in the same sense that it is in Europe because it does not pose a geopolitical threat. The United States does not face political disintegration from unemployment, whatever the number is. Europe might. At the same time, I would agree that the United States faces a potentially significant but longer-term geopolitical problem deriving from economic trends.
