I also suspect there is more to the story, and I would like to point out that he was unemployed from 1993 to 2007, which is a period that included an immense economic boom. I don't see how the current tottering state of the economy explains his inability to find any employment at all from 1993 to 1999, which was as good a time for an engineer to be hired as I can imagine. I was there in that job market, and there was a constant problem of recruiters cold-calling people by randomly dialing company numbers and trying to tempt them with higher salaries. There were all sorts of company policies to stop that from happening, including assigning phone numbers out of a really large space and making incoming calls go through the receptionist. For a physicist and acoustical engineer with computer programming experience to not be employed at all in the late 1990s - sorry, blame it on anything you want, but don't blame it on the American economy.
EDIT: also, that same LinkedIn profile claims he started his masters degree in Plasma Physics in 1972, when he would have been around 16. Come on people, engage some critical thinking here. You're not hearing the whole story, and you're not hearing it from a reliable source.
He spent ten years liquidating all of his assets and caring for his aging parents until they passed on. I don't know that it explains the entire employment gap but it seems reasonable that he would be a tough sell for many companies: older, and despite the good education and prior employment history, his skills are bound to be rusty. He was deliberately not working during that period.
He was only 33 years old in 1990. According to his story, he already had 8 years of experience as a senior engineer at Lockheed, plus two masters degrees in Physics and EE, and more than a decade of computer programming experience, and connections all over the aerospace industry. If he made a choice to not work for the next 18 years, while becoming indigent and sliding into homelessness, that's not something to be solved by the American economy. And he is not the first man with ailing parents, you know.
>I also suspect there is more to the story, and I would like to point out that he was unemployed from 1993 to 2007
This is an excellent point. I was working for a Boston-area acoustical consulting firm in the late 1990's and we had a hell of a time recruiting people. After an unwillingness to so so, the firm had to start giving out signing bonuses to attract candidates and still lost applicants to competing firms.
EDIT: also, that same LinkedIn profile claims he started his masters degree in Plasma Physics in 1972, when he would have been around 16. Come on people, engage some critical thinking here. You're not hearing the whole story, and you're not hearing it from a reliable source.