Being Contrarian

I guess it's pick on MattY week.  It looks like he just wants to say things that people don't like then argue why they are good or inevitable or something.  Yesterday it was a really, really bad argument that hedge funds buying single family homes to rent out to the poor folks that can't get mortgages was somehow a good thing because teh market. Today it's saying that it makes perfect sense to discriminate against long term unemployed because heuristics. 

But it doesn't.  If you actually use time unemployed as a screening mechanism then you are either pathetically lazy, or monumentally stupid.  Lots of people lose jobs for lots of different reasons, but if you want to screen short term vs. long term unemployed, then at present it is the long term that are less likely to have been laid off/fired due to their own faults (someone who got laid off when the economy was tanking, vs. rather than during the tepid recovery, is more likely to have been a victim of circumstanse).  Further, the long term unemployed are more likely to be eager to work hard for a new employer.

There is almost certainly a somewhat functional screening element preferring employed people over unemployed (for any duration), but that is not what Matt was saying.