An explorable · what unemployment is actually made of

Print money: do you get jobs, or just inflation?

The economy's in a slump — 6.5% unemployment. The central bank can print money to stimulate it. The catch is that unemployment isn't one thing — it's three, stacked. Printing can only reach one of them. Drag and watch which.

1Print money — drag right across the chart. Watch the top band shrink.

cyclical — idled by weak demand frictional — between jobs structural — skills/location mismatch inflation

unemployment — inflation — —

The takeaway will appear here once you've discovered it — keep going.

A simplified model: cyclical unemployment closes with stimulus up to “full employment” (the natural rate / NAIRU); the frictional + structural remainder is the floor, lowered only by real reform, not money; printing past the floor spills into inflation (a wage-price spiral). Real numbers move around and the natural rate itself drifts — but this is genuinely why money can cure some unemployment and not the rest.