It's surprising to me that this comment is so highly upvoted, given how fundamentally it misunderstands unemployment. What you are implying is that "low unempl

It's surprising to me that this comment is so highly upvoted, given how fundamentally it misunderstands unemployment. What you are implying is that "low unemployment" means people who didn't want to work are being forced to. But that is not what the usually-quoted (and quoted here) unenmployment number means. When people quote "unemployment" they usually mean U3, which is the number of people who are actively looking for a job. If what you describe were happening, that dire economic conditions were forcing more people to look for work, the "unenmployment rate" would go up, not down. The unemployment rate is not the labor force participation rate. And even the labor force participation rate is deeply misleading, because it encodes demographic statistics in a way that has complex effects that are hard to account for.