DON PECK: "When you have these long periods of unemployment, they can really leave pretty big scars on people, families and communities that are not lost even once the recession is over. When men, in particular, struggle economically, or when they don’t have jobs, women simply don’t marry them, but they do have children with them. And that creates often the sort of unstable family environment in which children really struggle.”

FAITH LAPIDUS: What would he do about the employment problems in the United States?

DON PECK: “One of the main messages of my book 'Pinched' is we can recover from this period faster with concerted public action.”

In the short term, he thinks the government should invest more in public works to create jobs in manufacturing and construction.

DON PECK: “But I think in the longer term we also need to really work to build new skills and create more pathways into the middle class for high school students who might not be going to college.

“That sense of possibility and that concrete sense of how one can move forward in life if one isn’t going to a four year college to some extent has been lost in the U.S. over the past twenty or thirty years. One of the things we need to do is rebuild that and give young people an understanding of the ways in which they can build skills and build real careers.”

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DOUG JOHNSON: Our program was written and produced by Brianna Blake. I’m Doug Johnson.