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The authors come up with a variety of numbers, including one that has received a lot of attention: potential G.D.P.—broadly speaking, the level of G.D.P. consistent with stable inflation—“is currently about 7 percent below the trajectory it appeared to be on prior to 2007.” According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, the G.D.P. is now close to seventeen trillion dollars, and seven per cent of that figure is $1.2 trillion. This is a lot of money to have gone missing, especially if it will never be recovered. Hence Krugman’s dire conclusion: “By tolerating high unemployment we have inflicted huge damage on our long-run prospects …. What passes these days for sound policy is in fact a form of economic self-mutilation, which will cripple America for many years to come.”

As well as figuring out the current level of potential G.D.P., the authors estimate its growth rate. This is the more important figure, because it’s what determines living standards over the long term

In the nineteen-eighties, Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard, who is now the chief economist of the I.M.F., resurrected the idea and gave it a new name, which they borrowed from engineering: hysteresis. Blanchard and Summers examined hysteresis in Europe, where high rates of unemployment have long been a problem.

The good news is that things aren’t quite as bad as the figures in the Fed paper might suggest. If we can get policy right and sharply increase the level of over-all demand in the economy, most of the damage done in the past five years is reversible.

At the moment, sadly, there is no prospect of any more fiscal stimulus, let alone a war-sized one, and the onus is falling on the Fed to gee up the economy.

Between 2000 and 2011, on average, 17 manufacturers closed up shop every day across the country, according to research from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process. Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.

But he was frustrated with the quality, and the lengthy process.

“We just avoid so many big and small stumbles that invariably happen when you try to do things from far away,” he said. “We would never be where we are today if we were overseas. Nowhere close.”

Time was foremost among them. The Indian mill needed too much time — three to five months — to perfect its designs, send samples, schedule production, ship the fabric to the United States and get it through customs. Mr. Winthrop was hesitant to predict demand that far in advance.

There were also communication issues.

like moving half-finished yarn between machines on forklifts.

The North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 was the first blow, erasing import duties on much of the apparel produced in Mexico.

Self-driving vehicles are an example of the crosscurrents.

Ad sales agents and pilots are two jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects will decline in number over the next decade. Flying a plane is largely automated today and will become more so.

Telemarketers are among those most at risk

More than 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are not working, up from 5 percent in the late 1960s; 30 percent of women in this age group are not working, up from 25 percent in the late 1990s.

“The answer is surely not to try to stop technical change,” Mr. Summers said, “but the answer is not to just suppose that everything’s going to be O.K. because the magic of the market will assure that’s true.”

The country should also use its political clout to convince its partners and Brussels to implement a European reform agenda that targets investment and growth.

The goal is to be able to ship gas to Ukraine at an annual rate of more than three billion cubic meters by the time the heating season begins in the autumn, increasing the flow to up to 10 billion cubic meters annually by next spring. Last year Ukraine imported nearly 30 billion cubic meters of gas, according to a recent report by the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.

Part of his message is that, even though gas demand in Europe has been weak because of sluggish economies, imports from Russia actually rose last year by about 16 percent as other sources of supply including Norway and Algeria declined. Europe, he warned, is simply not prepared to do without gas from Russia.

But with the gradual introduction of more competitive pricing in the European markets, the gas business has become much less attractive for ENI and other big gas middlemen. They are stuck with high-priced long-term contracts to a handful of suppliers like Gazprom and Sonatrach, the Algerian state-owned company, while their customers are able to secure gas at often lower spot market prices — assuming the gas is flowing.

The pipeline would be a major new source of Russian gas for energy-hungry Europe. But European Union authorities have become deeply skeptical about the South Stream plan, seeing it as just another way of making Europe more dependent on Russian energy.

hose outages in 2006 and 2009 are a top reason that the European Union had already been trying to chip away at Europe’s dependence on Russia even before the Crimea annexation.

That is partly because powerful Eastern European countries like Poland argue that such clean-energy policies would impede their ability to reduce Russian dependence by mining more coal or developing their own shale gas resources.

nd this month, the European Commission issued rules aimed at reducing the subsidies that governments use to support the wind and solar industries,

As US coal demand declines, more US coal is going to Europe, where low CO2 prices and high gas prices are increasing the competitiveness of coal in the power generation system.