[karzeem]

Is 0% unemployment a good end in and of itself? Sometimes industries go through changes that reduce the number of people required to get the work done. It seems like if you're too aggressive about driving unemployment to 0, you end up with all your companies looking like GM.

That isn't to say that unemployment is desirable, and at current levels, it's almost certainly destructive. But the measures required to take unemployment from, say, 2-3% to 0 may cause more harm than good.

[petercooper]

Total employment is certainly bad from a productivity POV. For a better overall level of production, it's necessary for any system (even one as large as the entire labor market) to have some idle capacity to cope with growth and expedition.

That said, this is an economic standpoint, rather than a social one, but hopefully I'm not being too opaque with my bias :-)