Unemployment can harm growth because it is a waste of resources; generates redistributive pressures and subsequent distortions; drives people to poverty; constrains liquidity limiting labor mobility; and erodes self-esteem promoting social dislocation, unrest, and conflict. The 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert J. Shiller, said that rising inequality in the United States and elsewhere is the most important problem. Costs
Individual
Unemployed individuals are unable to earn money to meet financial obligations. Failure to pay mortgage payments or to pay rent may lead to homelessness through foreclosure or eviction. Across the United States the growing ranks of people made homeless in the foreclosure crisis are generating tent cities.Unemployment increases susceptibility to cardiovascular disease, somatization, anxiety disorders, depression, and suicide. In addition, unemployed people have higher rates of medication use, poor diet, physician visits, tobacco smoking, alcoholic beverage consumption, drug use, and lower rates of exercise. According to a study published in Social Indicator Research, even those who tend to be optimistic find it difficult to look on the bright side of things when unemployed.
"Financial Liberalization, the European Single Currency and the Problem of Unemployment". In Franzini, M.; Pizzuti, F. R. (eds.). Globalization, Institutions and Social Cohesion. Heidelberg: Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-67741-3. Historical: Europe and Japan
Beveridge, William H. (1944). Full Employment in a Free Society (1st ed.). Allen & Unwin., in Great Britain. Broadberry, Stephen N., and Albrecht Ritschl. "Real Wages, Productivity, and Unemployment in Britain and Germany during the 1920s." Explorations in Economic History 32.3 (1995): 327-349. Dimsdale, Nicholas H., Nicholas Horsewood, and Arthur Van Riel. "Unemployment in interwar Germany: an analysis of the labor market, 1927-1936." Journal of Economic History (2006): 778-808. online
Heimberger, Philipp, Jakob Kapeller, and Bernhard Schütz. "The NAIRU determinants: What’s structural about unemployment in Europe?." Journal of Policy Modeling 39.5 (2017): 883-908. online
Kato, Michiya. "Unemployment and Public Works Policy in Interwar Britain and Japan: An International Comparison." (2010): 69-101. online
Kaufman, Roger T. "Patterns of Unemployment in North America, Western Europe and Japan." Unemployment in Western countries (Palgrave Macmillan, 1980). 3-35. Nickell, Stephen, Luca Nunziata, and Wolfgang Ochel. "Unemployment in the OECD since the 1960s. What do we know?." Economic Journal 115.500 (2005): 1-27 online. Stachura, Peter D., ed. Unemployment and the great depression in Weimar Germany (Springer, 1986). Topp, Niels-Henrik. "Unemployment and Economic Policy in Denmark in the 1930s." Scandinavian Economic History Review 56.1 (2008): 71-90. Webb, Sidney (1912). How the Government Can Prevent Unemployment. The National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution. (First ed.). Letchworth, Herts. : Garden City Press Ltd., in Great Britain

Historical: United States
Jensen, Richard J.