A reader writes in, having just heard somebody or other claim that the current unemployment rate would be much lower if unemployment benefits were even less generous, and asks whether this can be true. And the answer is no. People who say things like this are fundamentally confused about what the economic research actually means.

Here’s what is true: there’s respectable research — e.g., here — suggesting that unemployment benefits make workers more choosy in the search process. It’s not that workers decide to live a life of ease on a fraction of their previous wage; it’s that they become more willing to take the risk of being unemployed for an extra week while looking for a better job.

What this means, in turn, is that UI may raise the “full employment” level of unemployment — the level at which labor shortages start to appear, wages start an upward spiral, and inflation becomes a potential problem. Since the Fed raises interest rates when it sees signs of inflation, there is a sense in which UI raises unemployment on average over the business cycle.

But all of this is totally irrelevant to our current situation, where inflation is running below target, the target is too low anyway, and the reason we have mass unemployment is that there just isn’t enough demand, and hence there just aren’t enough jobs, no matter how desperately people search for them.

One way to think about this is to say that unemployment benefits may, perhaps, reduce the economy’s speed limit, if we think of speed as inversely related to unemployment. And this suggests an analogy. Imagine that you’re driving along a stretch of highway where the legal speed limit is 55 miles an hour. Unfortunately, however, you’re caught in a traffic jam, making an average of just 15 miles an hour. And the guy next to you says, “I blame those bureaucrats at the highway authority — if only they would raise the speed limit to 65, we’d be going 10 miles an hour faster.”

Dumb, right? Well, so is the claim that unemployment benefits are causing today’s high unemployment.