According to the latest survey from the Kauffman Foundation, top economics bloggers in the U.S. (of which yours truly was one) have a very dim view of the economy, only half of the respondents seeing employment growth in the next three years with their survey responses providing all the input for the dismal word cloud below.

Full results are available in this report(.pdf) where one will learn that almost two-thirds of respondents said the government is too involved in the economy and political party affiliation is not what one might expect of a group heavy on economics professors – 39 percent independent, 19 democrat, 8 republican, 34 not disclosed.

As the nation laments the dim prospects for its labor market on this Labor Day, we see another example of how the fundamental problem behind the bleak jobs picture fails to be understood, this story by Zachary Roth at The Lookout regurgitating what passes for conventional wisdom these days when it comes to root causes, citing a lack of consumer demand (irrespective of how the prior demand levels were attained) and providing more evidence that conventional wisdom is often wrong.

Right now, what’s holding back the economy is a lack of demand, in the form of consumer spending. And that lack of demand stems largely from the enormous loss of housing wealth that occurred in recent years. Until the housing sector picks up, the economy as a whole will struggle. And a successful mortgage modification program could have helped quite a lot.

But there’s something else worth keeping in mind: Economic shocks like the one we went through with the housing bust and the financial crisis take a long time to recover from. In a paper written last year for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the economists Carmen and Vincent Reinhart, experts on the history of such crises, concluded that the effects typically linger for around a decade. “Income growth tends to slow and unemployment remains elevated for a very long time after a severe shock,” they wrote, predicting “a lengthy period of retrenchment.”

Until you start hearing policy makers and economics writers say, “Much of the economic growth we’ve seen in recent decades has been due to the unsustainable rise in asset prices and an unhealthy increase in debt at all levels – government, corporate, and personal. We must acknowledge these as the root causes and restructure the economy and financial markets accordingly before we can move forward in a meaningful way”, we’re not likely to make much progress in creating jobs or restoring the once robust levels of economic growth the U.S. has become accustomed to, if that’s even possible.

In this story at Fortune on Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius downgrading his forecast for U.S. economic growth to just a 1.5 percent rate in the second quarter, just six months after gushing over the prospects of that same economy growing at a multiple of that rate, Colin Barr provides some astute observations about the dismal set.

But if good news for job seekers is hard to come by, consider for a moment how hard this year has been for economists. One bit of frustration shared by Bernanke and Hatzius is that their models aren’t saying what exactly is sapping the demand that they expected to pick up. Common sense might well dictate that a credit bubble that took the better part of a decade to build up wouldn’t necessarily be squared away in just three or four years, but apparently there is no formula that says this is so. This is what passes for mystery among dismal scientists.

“The ‘bugbear’ is that we are still unsure about the precise reasons for the slowdown in 2011 to date, which is sharply at odds with our expectation at the end of last year that growth would accelerate in 2011,” Hatzius writes. “Logically, the explanation presumably has to involve a combination of a) unforeseen shocks from the Japan earthquake and the oil market, coupled with b) more vulnerability to these shocks, because c) the housing and credit market downturn is weighing on private-sector balance sheets for even longer than we thought. But the relative importance of these issues is exceptionally difficult to sort out, and it makes a great deal of difference for the outlook.”

Or rather, it makes no difference to the outlook. What makes a difference there is that lots of people have no money and even more lack confidence they will be employed a year from now, so no one is spending. One day economists may decide to open their eyes to these obvious truths, but not just yet. Even with the economy at stall speed and Europe on the verge of collapse, wishful thinking carries the day.

The U.S. economy might be a lot better off if we fired most of the economists…