So I hate to be the "econ 101" guy here, but unfortunately this is an egregious case. Jobs are not these floating vacancies that exist without workers or wages

So I hate to be the "econ 101" guy here, but unfortunately this is an egregious case. Jobs are not these floating vacancies that exist without workers or wages. Rather, a company will say, at a wage of 50 cents, want 5 million jobs. At a wage of $1, want 1 million jobs. At a wage of $2, want 500,000 jobs. At a wage of $3, want 200,000 jobs, etc. In other words, as wages go up, various activities that employ labor become unprofitable and the labor is no longer demanded at the higher wage. In other words, there is a schedule, or function, relating how many jobs the firm wants as a function of the wage. Similarly, there are not 1 million job seekers at any price. For a wage of 50 cents, there may only be 100,000 seekers. For a wage of $1, there may be a million, for a wage of $2 there may be 2 million, etc. Thus workers are not willing to work for any wage. As the wage goes up, more people enter the labor market. How does that happen? People delay retirement, or they postpone taking some time off for other reasons, or they switch from a part time job to a full time job or even take on extra hours. Yup, people respond to incentives. Sometimes there is a news article pointing this out, and some commenters here react as if this is some profound revelation that poses a challenge to capitalism, etc, rather than just basic supply and demand. Want more workers? Increase the pay. Now one of these is an increasing curve, the other is a decreasing curve, and thus there is some market clearing wage at which both the jobs demanded by firms is equal to the workers desiring to work at that wage. Therefore "in the real world", the number of jobs equalizes to the number of workers assuming workers are allowed to enter/exit the labor market and assuming that firms are allowed to adjust the offer wage. This is the basic stuff. Once the basic stuff is understood, we can add various complications, like a search market, information asymmetry, transition costs, downward "stickiness" of wages, occupational licensing making it illegal for workers to enter, expectations, etc. One can cook up odd situations in which one of these curves is backwards bending, resulting in two equilibria, one "good", one "bad", etc. But all these complications merely add second order adjustments to the Marshallian scissors. But if your simple thought experiment is ignoring curves and thinking there are just two numbers "workers available" and "jobs open", and one may be too big for the other, so there are "too few" jobs or "too many" jobs, then it's a bad thought experiment.