The latest employment statistics did little to allay fears of a jobless recovery in the US — a situation in which GDP growth and corporate profits return to healthy levels, but unemployment remains high. Particularly scary is the specter of ‘structural unemployment’ – joblessness without end for some large group of people who want work, but can’t find it. Writing in The Atlantic, Don Peck describes it as “a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.”