One of the most common stereotypes of people who have graduated with degrees in the liberal arts is that their best career option is going to involve asking, “Would you like fries with that?” In other words, even though they have received a significant amount of technical training in some field, they are (so the stereotype goes) only slightly better off than those who have little to no job training or work experience. In this paper, I will examine the current state of the economy overall, how the current state of the economy affects levels of unemployment and underemployment, the relationship between overall levels of underemployment and unemployment to the levels of underemployment and unemployment experienced by liberal arts majors. I will show that the common stereotype about liberal arts majors is untrue in that they do not commonly experience levels of underemployment that are much higher than those experienced by people who have degrees in other fields. After that, I will examine the actual effects of underemployment on those who experience it, and various reasons why they are underemployed. Unemployment and the Economy Since 2008, the economy of the United States of America, and of much of the Western world, has been in the doldrums. Housing prices, and most stock prices, experienced sharp declines as it became increasingly obvious that the fevered economic activity of previous years had been, in the well-known phrase coined by Alan Greenspan to refer to the previous bull market of the 1990s, a period of “irrational exuberance.” Prior to the crash, subprime lending had expanded to, during 2007, nearly 20% of all home loans1. Many of these were clearly loans to people who had no possible way to pay them back. Many others were to people who would, in the best of circumstances, find it quite difficult to repay their obligations, and almost all of them were made to people with little or no independent validation of their credit-worthiness. In addition, many of them came with adjustable rates that rose quite dramatically after an initial period. At the same time that these highly questionable lending practices were going on, housing prices were reaching the top of a precipitous climb. These developments were not limited to the US. In China, construction began on entire cities and what were intended to be some of the largest malls and office complexes in the world, many of which have since been abandoned or which have only marginal occupancy.2 At the same time, the standards for personal credit were dramatically relaxed. In general, over the past few decades, the US has run a current account deficit, which means that we import more than we export. At the same time, we ran a capital account surplus, which meant that we were receiving more foreign investment than we were making abroad.3 Because of this, the “price” of credit (aka the interest rate) fell, and not only did it fall, it fell to such an extent that lenders would lose money by not finding borrowers because the interest rate was lower than the rate of inflation. In order to avoid losing money, to make a long story short, lenders went out looking for someone, anyone, to lend money to. In response, people went crazy, they took advantage of rising home prices to take out second or even third mortgages, they borrowed money for anything and everything they possibly could. Borrowers in the US borrowed until they couldn't borrow anymore. They were left incredibly over-exposed because, even with the economy on fire, they had gone into such deep debt that they often had trouble making payments. In a way, they were comparable to the grasshoppers who played while the ants stored food. And then it started to get cold... In 2007, a number of highly-leveraged companies started to go bankrupt. In 2008, this spread to larger and better-known companies such as Lehman Brothers and AIG. The story from that point forward is well-known and there really isn't any point in telling it. We are now in 2013 and little has changed in the economy since 2008, for better or worse. While it is true that unemployment4 has declined slightly from a high of 10 percent in October 2009 to 7.6 percent in March 20135, the other side of the coin is that the civilian labor force participation rate has declined, during the same period of time, from 65 percent to 63.3 percent. It must be kept in mind that the commonly reported unemployment rate of 7.6 percent is not the entire story. What is typically called unemployment is, in fact, only one of six measures of unemployment that are measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are called U-1 though U-6. The one reported on the news is U-3. While U-3 has declined by 9.5 percent from 8.4 percent to 7.6 percent over the past year, U-6, which consists of "[t]otal unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force