Did the Recession Make You Stupid?

Now is sort of an awkward time to bring this up, but being out of work for a long time is one of the worst things that can happen to you. Your work skills atrophy, and you're more likely to be depressed. Your earning potential falls. Even very basic skills can decline -- one study found that people who lost their jobs did worse on tests of reading and basic math abilities.

That's the bad news. Here's the worse news: Those effects seem to be long-lasting. Income setbacks during a recession can stay with you throughout your career -- for example, studies of people who graduate into a recession show that even decades later, they're not earning as much as people who graduated into sunnier environments. But a new study from Europe seems to show that even cognitive declines are persistent: