The decline of work is more than an economic challenge — though it is clearly that. It is also a profound moral, familial, and even spiritual crisis for those affected. Americans derive a large measure of their self-esteem from work. Prolonged joblessness is linked to depression, disease, family break-ups, suicide, and, of course, poverty.

Just as Republicans are wise to offer alternatives to Obamacare (as Senators Coburn, Burr, and Hatch have recently done), they should be proposing policy initiatives to create jobs. Strain suggests several: relocation subsidies to help people move from high-unemployment regions to those with more job openings, eliminating barriers to entry such as excessive licensing requirements (it requires an average of 372 training days to become a cosmetologist, compared with 33 days to become an emergency medical technician), permitting more high-skilled immigration (25 percent of engineering and tech businesses founded between 1995 and 2005 had at least one immigrant founder), and decreasing the minimum wage for the first six months of employment for those who’ve been unemployed for longer than 27 weeks.