Today I have been looking at long-term unemployment as part of a larger project. It is on the rise again and always lags behind the overall unemployment movements given it takes time for people to work their way through the duration categories until they get to 52 weeks. The longer the recession the higher average duration of unemployment becomes and the larger the pool of long-term unemployed. However, the way we feel about long-term unemployment is conditioned heavily by how it is defined. Moreover, we also have built up an elaborate set of myths about the way long-term unemployment behaves and consider it needs to be dealt with via training rather than job creation – the so-called irreversibility hypothesis. This blog looks at these issues.