Yes, but, unemployment should not lower GDP. GDP is “gross domestic product”. Unemployment may affect private consumption, but it does not affect productivity or gross product.
In the “Game Solution” thread, the game state showed a zero unemployment economy which performed a lot better, in the game, than it should. If the game is struggling to catch up to reality in terms of modeling the effects of full employment, it needs to make them even more inefficient and painful, not add another reward for full employment which does not even make sense.
In the real world, there is no way to have full employment without causing a skills shortage. In the game, this is offset by highly educating everyone - but you would still have a skills shortage, because everyone would have skills, but they would all be employed and there wouldn’t be enough of them.
In raw gameplay terms, education and technology are the strongest ways to quickly fix the economy. Education is stronger, because it can be consolidated with just the “University Grants” policy. It’s very easy to win the first re-election, which is the hardest re-election, without bending over backwards to any particular constituency, and just flattering “Everyone” with immediate “education” and “health” effects on human development.
For both game balance and realism, greater inertia should be added to these effects. It takes four years of public investment in “University Grants” for these to begin to render any returns on education, so any politician that does this is going to be running for a four-year re-election at a point in which he has spent significant public money on such a program, but has not yet seen returns. It takes much longer than four years for such a policy to exercise its complete effect on the education level of the workforce.
Technology should also be much more inert. Technological advances have, and should continue to massively increase human productivity - if anything, the magnitude of technology effects in the game is underpowered, because the game doesn’t (and for simplicity, shouldn’t) attempt to model economic paradigm shifts on the order of industrial revolutions. For the United States, technology is fine, it just needs much greater inertia.
For other countries, particularly Spain and Italy, their access to technology will depend more on foreign relations than on local investment. The technological strategy of NATO/EU vassals, is to wait for the Empire to make technology, and then to beg for it. However, I think that game development would be over its head in trying to accurately model the effects on international dependencies on less-played countries, and it would make them boring to play, because really, so much of what goes on in these societies is beyond the ability of national policy to control. They are ships at the mercy of the sea.
So, my vote is to leave Unemployment:GDP alone, obligate “Skills Shortage” at or near zero unemployment or add a new “Labor Shortage” crisis, and if your inertia cap is 8 years, cap out the inertia for all “Education” and “Technology” policies. This will make the game, which I now consider to be too easy, harder and more realistic.