I really disagree -- with unemployment any sense of additional worth you get from being able to hold down a job evaporates. Not to mention that having to keep to a schedule for a job is much healthier than the wacky hours you can end up with when you're unemployed and wake/sleep according to your natural schedule.
Not to mention your sense of self-image if you get turned down for positions again and again. I disagree with you though on waking and sleeping on your natural schedule--it seems like that should be the healthier option.
Though I think the issue here is one of immediate happiness vs. reflective happiness. If you have a bad job, at least 8 hours of your day are spent not liking your current situation. (But at least you have a job, can feed the family, etc.) If you're unemployed, your day-to-day life may be less stressful without those 8 hours of teeth-grinding and you get to hang out with your cat a lot more. (But you can't get a job, your kids are going hungry, whatever.) Going from depressed unemployment to a crappy job is worse though, I think because it makes you miserable day-to-day and reflectively too for a while, since you still haven't gotten over your unemployment depression.
Happiness is strongly correlated with income up until $60k or so, then it levels off. If the crappy job is also low-income that just makes things worse.
I do wonder about that figure, is that for people in the US because it is just above the mean US salary. In some parts of the world you would be very comfortable on that salary, in other parts you will struggle to find accommodation.
Yeah, it's from US data. In some places even $200/mo lets you live like a member of the upper class... I originally remember hearing the figure from a TED talk ( here it is, highly recommended http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper... ), and since then there have been a few other sources I can't remember right now.
If the job is really lousy, then the sense of relief is tremendous. I recall working with a paranoid psychopath founder for a year and a half, having had enough when they fired our top manager/architect because he dared doubt her sanity, handing a letter of resignation to my long-suffering co-manager (who was in no way responsible for the situation) and walking out the door into the bright sunshine on a perfect summer day.
Fired up my festiva, turned the radio on loud - it was playing Taking Care of Business! Really! Putting it in 2nd gear and cruising through town slowly with the windows down and so happy.
Spent months unemployed, ended up starting a consulting partnership. One of the best career moves I ever made. Never depressed for a millisecond.
The article's about a study finding these changed rates of depression, not really a subjective opinion about the value of employment/unemployment to agree or disagree with (though you can disagree with the study's methodology, or how generalizable its results are, or its way of defining 'poor-quality job', 'depression', etc.).
