The smoke and mirrors are real, so it's helpful to understand how the different entities (ie government, public corporations, private businesses, etc) play with the different numbers and metrics to sell a certain narrative. It's easy to say that there are plenty of jobs, but if those jobs are hourly, then it makes sense that those with many years of experience and advanced degrees will not apply. It's easy for employers to say they're meeting different legal requirements by fake posting a job that they intend to fill internally or including a salary range of $1-1,000,000 in their job descriptions or telling their current hourly employees not to work overtime or even capping the number of hours employees work so they don't have to pay taxes or employee benefits. All these things sell a story that is disingenuous.
The economic disparity is real and wholly due to the games that all of these entities play. While there may be some people who don't want to work or who aren't realistic with their expectations, most qualified people do actually want to work.
I'll give an insight into my own experience. In 2003 I moved to a major metropolitan city. My background is in accounting and at the time I had about 7 years of work experience. I did a lot of temporary work as I job searched, and ultimately I got an interview and job offer with one of the top management consulting firms. Their job offer was for $30K, which I promptly turned down because it was insultingly low. This is a private company who could have more than paid the $40K that I asked for. After a lot of back and forth, I did end up taking the job against my best judgement because at the time I really needed a solid and stable job. My former employer's model was to deliberately keep any administrative salaries low because they figured anyone would want their company name on their resume, and anyone who left could promptly be replaced. In hindsight I should have kept looking, but on the other hand I did learn some very valuable lessons through my time and experience with that one company. Had I passed on the job and kept looking, would you then say it was because I didn't want to work or because my salary expectations were unreasonable?
My point is that we should be careful about our assumptions. Those numbers that are released about unemployment and the economy have been manipulated to sell a certain narrative. Recent events have shown that statistics are manipulated all the time (ie low sample size or definitions changed or actual results hidden and/or thrown out completely and excluded from the sample). Good questions to ask yourself are who's funding the studies or who ultimately benefits from the high numbers and the low numbers.
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