[fnordsensei]

All countries need unemployment. It's just one of those bizarre side effects of our economy. If "the reserve" is too small, salaries go up due to employees being scarce, which drives up prices, which drives up salaries and so on, and you could end up with rampant inflation, which hurts exports and can lead to a economic depression and possibly a systems collapse. This very nearly happened to Sweden in the seventies and eighties, and politicians have since learned to pretend that they want everyone to have a job, but at the same time carefully manage the country so that there's not too little unemployment.

In part, the problem was solved by worker immigration as well, which may be the less altruistic part of Sweden's traditionally open stance to immigration. This, along with the fact that Sweden has negative nativity.

Sweden currently has 6.2% unemployment, which may be a tad too much, but for the vast majority is nowhere near "spending most of their adult life on the dole". It is possible to have a country with no unemployment, but not one that has a market economy.

The pension system does need a reform though, primarily because we live longer lives and it's made for a population with shorter life spans.