ABSTRACT
Unemployment is one of the major sources of misery in our society. When people record their sense of well-being, it is found that being unemployed makes a person much more unhappy than being poor. 2 So a civilized society should not tolerate our present levels of unemployment. The European Unions member governments have called for unemployment to be reduced to 5 per cent. Is it possible? If we seriously want a big cut in unemployment, we should focus sharply on those policies which stand a good chance of having a really big effect. It is not true that all policies which are good in general are good for unemployment. There are in fact very few policies where the evidence points to any large unambiguous effect on unemployment and I list in Annex 1 some widely advocated policies for which there is little clear evidence.
