People grossly overuse (and abuse) the term unemployment like this. First, an unemployment rate of 0% is bad. This is because not all unemployment is bad. Fr

People grossly overuse (and abuse) the term unemployment like this. First, an unemployment rate of 0% is bad. This is because not all unemployment is bad. Frictional unemployment is actually a good thing (to a certain extent), because the alternative is having people stuck doing jobs they don't want when better jobs are available. Structural unemployment is what happens when $old_industry dies because $disruptive_tech_company changes the market. It's definitely bad for the unemployed (who will never be re-employed in the same field), but it's usually the result of positive improvements to society at large. The 'solution' is that those people losing their jobs need to be retrained to work in another field, which is admittedly difficult, or retire. Cyclical unemployment is undeniably bad. That's the result of boom-and-bust economies - people over-hiring during bubbles, and then having to lay off en masse when the market contracts. (The problem is largely that the people are being dumped into the jobs marketplace all at once, creating a glut, instead of being more evenly distributed). The rest - someone who's employed but at a salary lower than what they'd like, or someone who retires because they're laid off... that's not unemployment. Someone may dislike it and they may think it's a 'problem' that needs to be 'fixed', but they need to realize that they're talking about something completely different from unemployment. As for real unemployment, the ideal value is a point of debate amongst economists because it is tricky to measure, but somewhere in the ballpark of 5% is a commonly accepted value for the target 'natural rate' of unemployment. That is, a sustained, unwavering value of 5% unemployment is actually the target for a healthy economy.