There’s a distinct sound of head scratching going on out there. We’ve a record number of job vacancies, lots of unemployed people and yet no one seems to be getting hired. What’s going on?

Britain’s employers might be struggling to fill a record 1 million job vacancies amid the worst labour shortages in a generation – with a lack of lorry drivers, hospitality staff and other workers vital for the economic reopening. But for millions like Cousin, navigating the jobs market remains tough.

With the end of furlough last week, hundreds of thousands of workers are likely to be on a similar journey. Many are expected to drift into early retirement or put off their job search until their sectors recover.

Despite a gradual fall in recent months as firms scramble to recruit, official figures show unemployment is still almost 200,000 higher than before Covid, standing at more than 1.5 million.

The answer is in the Nobel winning work of Chris Pissarides and colleagues - frictional unemployment. It takes time to run through the jobs on offer and decide which one seems suitable. It takes time to run through the applicants and ponder which seems the best fit. Therefore there will always be some part of the workforce going through that run through and ponder process.

We would expect that the greater specialisation of the modern economy will increase the time it takes. We’d also expect that online job searches and advertising will reduce it. The growth of the human resources bureaucracy in most organisations might well increase it again. We end up with the balance we have.

The warning for us is to ponder a further point. How much worse would it get with more bureaucracy? If we had all those insistences about checking social class of parents (an actual thing that people are trying to insist upon), race, gender, and so on and on? Things would be worse.

The lesson being that there are costs to absolutely everything as well as benefits to many. Any decision making process has to weigh both.