Vice President Joe Biden was on "The Daily Show" recently, being grilled, ever so lightly, by host Jon Stewart on why unemployment was so high and the Obama administration's $787 billion stimulus package seems to be producing so few jobs.

"As I sit here," Stewart asked, "I can't figure how to tell if you guys are Jedi masters who are making 10 chess moves ahead, or if this whole thing is kicking your asses."

Biden chuckled, "I think we're in between."

He went on to say that job growth traditionally lags behind growth in GDP by 12 to 18 months. By the first quarter of next year, he predicted, the stimulus program will begin producing jobs "and not just make-work jobs. We're trying to build a new platform for the 21st century."

President Barack Obama has scheduled a "jobs summit" next month to sell this concept and perhaps take some of the heat off House Democrats who face re-election next year. Republicans are shamelessly exploiting the crisis that began on their watch, but that's the nature of the political game.

The problem is that this is not a game. What may be occurring is a seismic shift in the American economy, one that could leave as many as one in four Americans permanently unemployed or so drastically underemployed that he or she can't make ends meet. That's the situation today. The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression has resulted in the greatest social dislocation since the Great Depression.

• Since December 2007, 8.2 million Americans have lost their jobs. Unemployment reached 10.2 percent in October, the highest since April 1982. Many economists forecast the jobless rate will stay above 10 percent well into the second quarter of 2010. And that counts only those who are actively seeking jobs; by some estimates, the real unemployment rate may be as high as 22 percent.

• The Mortgage Bankers Association has reported that 14 percent of American homeowners — a record high — were having trouble paying their home loans in the third quarter of the year: 9.6 percent were delinquent, and an additional 4.5 percent already were in foreclosure. A year ago, only 9.7 percent of mortgages were in trouble. Between August 2007 and August 2009, 1.8 million families lost their homes to foreclosure, and foreclosure proceedings had begun on another 5.6 million homes.

• On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 49 million Americans — including almost one of every four children — lived with hunger last year. With unemployment growing, it's safe to assume the problem is even worse this year.

• The Federal Reserve reported this month that consumer borrowing fell $14.8 billion in September, a record eight straight months of decline. This is not necessarily a bad thing; for years economists bemoaned the nation's spendthrift ways. But the economic good times Americans enjoyed in the 1990s and early 2000s were built on credit; a thriftier America will leave a lot of people out of work.

All of this comes on top of decades of jobs lost to mechanization, computerization and globalization, all of which led to a drastic decline in the American manufacturing base and declining union membership in the private sector. The service and retail sectors boomed, but those jobs usually don't come with the wages and benefits of manufacturing jobs. The tech sector has blossomed, but you can't get in there with a lousy education. The health care sector has grown to become 16 percent of the economy, creating a lot of jobs but also — as you might have heard — a cost explosion.

For decades, kids have been warned to prepare themselves for college if they wanted a job, but high school dropout rates still are increasing, and only 37 percent of the U.S. workforce has at least a bachelor's degree. Their median income in 2007 was almost $47,000, according to the Census Bureau. Meanwhile, the median for someone who had attended college but failed to get a four-year degree was nearly $33,000, and the median for a high school graduate was nearly $27,000.

Today, as college-educated workers get laid off, they often replace less-educated workers, as long as the better-educated worker is willing to work for less. Younger workers find it hard to move up because their older colleagues are putting off retirement.

Poverty, as the conservative Heritage Foundation reminds us, is a relative thing. "While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity," the foundation reported. "Most of America's 'poor' live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago."

Government regulation and spending only eased the economic dislocation caused by the Great Depression; as late as 1940, unemployment still was at 14.6 percent. It took World War II to end it.

It will take a similar, if not so bloody, shared sacrifice to end the current economic dislocation. The stimulus bill and Mr. Obama's "jobs summit" won't do it by itself. Growth without jobs is not recovery.

We must end disparities in medical care and get costs under control. We must get the financial plunderers under control and get credit moving for small businesses. We must keep Americans in their homes under responsible terms. We must hold more parents and schools responsible for their children's education and make college affordable. And we must do all of this without exploding the deficit.