MJS Yeah I totally agree with you. The fact that people who are out of work for 7 months tend to stay out of work for a much longer time thereafter is correlated to the length of unemployment but is not the cause of the excessive length of unemployment.

Essentially, what I’m saying is that once someone has reached 7 months of unemployment- they’re kind of gone already. My point is much to that of yours: we should be looking at interventions prior to the 7th month to see if they can be brought back into the labor market.

The example you gave of Facebook is good at demonstrating that there will be a portion of the population who will be out of work beyond 7 months whether an intervention is held or not- just as it turned out that some people are more social than others.