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13 Jun 10 Employment isn’t important (but you should already know that)
Listening to the economical discourse of politicians and economists, you’d be forgiven for believing that employment is more important than anything for an economy. Just today, Barack Obama has gone to congress to ask for $50bn to “safeguard government jobs”.
Let me call bullshit: employment is irrelevant to the prosperity of a country, or a person for that matter. If employment was a desirable end in itself, why don’t we all give up all the technological progress of the last few hundred years and get busy digging ditches, filling them in, then digging them up again?
If we really want to make sure people stay busy for a long time, we can make them dig the ditches with toothpicks instead than shovels.
That sounds preposterous, yet it is exactly the argument underpinning the idea that you must be busy and stay busy to create wealth.
In actuality, creating wealth and prosperity is much simpler than just being busy: prosperity is created by underconsuming and overproducing, living within your means, creating more than you use/spend (though try telling this to a Keynesian speaking of “aggregate demand”). If you can cover your wants with 5 hours work a week, you are in essence a lot richer than someone who is struggling to make ends meet at 80 hours a week. Creating wealth is about maximising your outputs, not your inputs (time/labour).
Unfortunately, we live in a world that is upside down, where politicians and many economists alike are completely oblivious about what truly creates prosperity, in a world where most people are paid for their inputs rather than outputs, where looking like a busy-body gets rewarded better than doing the bare minimum to achieve what you want.
Next time someone starts talking about employment, be it on a personal level or macro-economic level, please call “bullshit” on the concept that being busy will somehow magically create prosperity, because it simply isn’t true.
