Unemployment is universally recognized as a bad thing. While economists and academics make convincing arguments that there is a certain natural level of unemployment that cannot be erased, elevated unemployment imposes significant costs on the individual, the society and the country. Worse yet, most of the costs are of the dead loss variety where there are no offsetting gains to the costs that everyone must bear. (Depending on how it's measured, the unemployment rate is open to interpretation. Learn how to find the real rate. Check out The Unemployment Rate: Get Real.)
The Costs to the Individual
The costs of unemployment to the individual are not hard to imagine. When a person loses his or her job, there is often an immediate impact to that person's standard of living. Prior to the Great Recession, the average savings rate in the U.S. had been drifting down towards zero (and sometimes below), and there are anecdotal reports that the average person is only a few weeks away from serious financial trouble without a paying job.
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