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What is it wasteful of? What if someone working such a job feels better about being alive, because they have a role to fill in a community? Why is having people doing forms of “make work” worse than letting people waste away into despair? Would you feel good about having your aunt thrown to the curb, because she has no marketable skills? The ideas of “efficiency” as they are used in economic theory are very narrow, and reflect a technical understanding of a vastly over simplified model of reality. Such models do provide insight into real life, but they are analytical tools, nothing more. Economics, as field of study, has a big problem with the concept of “value.” The price of things tends to stand in for the value of things, as it is easily measured. You don’t have to look hard to see the absurdity of taking this compromise too far. Look at military spending. Since dollars are spent buying a weapon, and workers get paid, profits are made, the “value” of the sale gets added into GDP. Then we take that missile, and blow it up. If we kill our enemies, then maybe one could say we got our money’s worth. If we kill only innocents, then I see it as more of an “anti-value.” What if it just blows up in the desert, and makes a multi-million dollar hole in the sand? Sort of a modern, high tech version of paying one group of workers to dig holes, and another to fill them in, is it not? |
How would you suggest choosing who gets to do the "make work" versus who must toil away at the necessary? How would you suggest compensating those whose work is more vanity than value if no one pays them for their output?