For an individual, being unemployed when you desperately need a job is never a good thing. However, a little unemployment in an economy is not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, some people don’t want to work – at least not in jobs that get listed on tax returns like stay-at-home moms and dads. That’s called voluntary unemployment, but it really shouldn’t even be counted in unemployment statistics. There are also always going to be people who are between jobs – having just left one job and waiting to start another, but not in real danger of long-term unemployment or desperate to find work. Economists call that “frictional unemployment.” Even if everybody who wanted a job had one, there would still be some “frictional” unemployment as people transitioned between jobs.
In reality, however, it’s extremely rare that every single person who wants a job is employed. Unemployment moves up and down in a cycle along with the rest of the economy and, while increased unemployment in a minor economic downturn is not a good thing, it isn’t an economic death knell. Some people will also be involuntarily unemployed because of structural unemployment – unemployment that happens because wages (the price of jobs) can’t change with demand or the right types of employees aren’t available for existing jobs.
Structural unemployment can be lowered in the short term by sparking inflation, but the unemployment goes back to its previous rate, so trying to push the unemployment rate below a certain level tends to make the economy unstable. Milton Friedman, who won the Noble Prize for Economics in the 1960s, called this level “natural unemployment” or NAIRU (the non-accelerating interest rate of unemployment). It’s the level of unemployment in an economy at which prices and jobs are stable. The NAIRU for the United States in the past two decades has been about 5%, and for most of that time, the economy has been quite healthy.
So, it’s not good if YOU are unemployed (assuming you want a job), but unemployment is a natural, unavoidable part of any economy.
Tags: employment, inflation, unemployment