Jobs are a cost not a benefit

We seem to be at the “Now That’s What I Call Economics” stage of repeating our greatest hits. Here it is Richard Murphy and Colin Hines who need to be reminded of the basics of economics - jobs are a cost of doing something, not a benefit.

Richard Murphy and Colin Hines stress the importance of the government spending money on creating jobs as well as on infrastructure to deal with the impact of coronavirus on people and the planet

No, we never do want to “create jobs”.

The catalyst for this is the need for new jobs in every community to counter the political, economic and personal trauma that will come in the wake of the coming tsunami of lost livelihoods across the country.

This is to entirely miss the vital distinctions necessary.

We desire that all be able to consume, that’s true. This means both that things are produced so they may be consumed and also that people have incomes so they may collect those things that they consume. This is not, absolutely not, the same as the desire to create jobs.

A job is the use of human labour to do something. We would much prefer - for we like leisure - that the consumption and the intermediary, the income (or, given that a real income is by definition what can be consumed, these two being the same thing) could be achieved by not having to employ that cost, the human labour.

We would, as we have been doing these past couple of centuries, like the machines to be doing the work.

This insistence upon “creating jobs” is to make the mistake Milton Friedman warned against. We want the ditch dug, certainly, we want everyone to be able to consume but issuing teaspoons isn’t the way to do it.

Jobs, the uses of human labour, are a cost of doing something, not a benefit. Thus those prancing about shouting about how many jobs their scheme will provide are preening themselves on how expensive their plan is. Which is not, when we come to think of it, very economic.