"Jobs" is the wrong metric


There's an old business saying: "What gets measured gets done."

Politicians love to talk about jobs.

Even better, how they are "creating" jobs.

But is "number of jobs created" really a good metric to be tracking and optimizing for?

Short answer: No.

Why not?

Some of the most urgent problems today are:

  • Wealth inequality
  • Environmental pollution
  • An aging population
  • An increasingly unhealthy population
  • An increasingly uneducated population
Does "creating jobs" solve any of these problems?

No, and in some cases, it makes them worse.

We need true education, innovation, and technology to solve these complex problems, not dead-end, part-time, low-quality "jobs" that sometimes pay less than being unemployed.

Let's start setting and measuring some education, health, and wealth gap goals, and see what gets done.

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