There's something I haven't heard people talk about that much. It's not just jobs: it's careers.
The unemployment figure simply reflects people's ability to pay their next set of bills. It doesn't mean there is any kind of long term security. I am unaware of any measure for this, but I am sure that it is going downhill. More and more career paths are being destroyed. Regardless of how many "jobs" there are out there (or not) people aren't going to feel as good about it unless they see a solid future. The decreasing availability of stable careers spreads just as much or more anxiety.
In California, the teaching profession has been basically destroyed. No college student in their right mind would take on the additional debt required to get a teaching credential in order to go into a career that may not see them in a permanent position for the foreseeable future. By the time someone graduating today works their way into a permanent position, odds are that wages, benefits, and pensions will be cut even further.
My career path—as a lawyer—started being a very bad move for most people a while ago. The $100,000+ of debt you are likely to take on in law school can only be justified if you go to work in life-stealing conditions for a while to pay them off. There are getting to be too many lawyers getting paid too little to do too little work to justify these outlays, especially for the 90% that don't go into BigLaw.
Just about any public position (again from the p.o.v. of California) is now openly attacked on t.v. commercials complaining that you get to retire when you're 55 as if this is some kind of crime against nature (assuming 25 years of service). Why should anyone go into the public sector when it's under attack politically, pays less, and seems about to lose its one advantage: the benefits.
I've read that people are changing jobs about every three years these days. I can't imagine this makes people feel very secure about their future. They have to hand over their retirement plans to Wall Street to try and earn enough to retire on and—sorry if Wall Street skims a few trillion here and there and makes it impossible for people to retire in huge windows of time—pray they have a good few decades at the dog track.
President Obama made a dent in this problem by making so that, one day in the future, people might have solid healthcare. But even if unemployment returns to a very low number, how can people ever expect to feel secure enough to drive the demand that drives the economy when these very benefits are being class-warred away from people?