From the headlines today, we read of plans to build a new ABC store, a new casino, and a new brewery. This is celebrated as an indicator of prosperity. By today’s standards, success is measured in terms of how many jobs are created. Availing addictive substances should create more jobs because, by definition, addicts are bent on depleting their resources. Instead of using productivity to measure prosperity, today’s economists measure what used to be called waste.
In another headline, we see that, now that employers don’t want to payroll anybody for more than thirty hours, joblessness is going down. Pay no attention to underemployment. All the whiz kids taking college courses in high school are supposed to be taken in by the announcement, too. Another headline informs us that guns kill more children than cancer does. The statistician was surely asleep, else he would have realized he could have gotten a much better ratio using the number of children that die from old age.
