Every politician in every country in the world has said the words “creating jobs” at some point. It is the universal political promise. Left, right, center – does not matter. “We will create jobs.” Applause. Standing ovation. Everyone goes home feeling good.

Nobody ever stops to ask a very obvious question: jobs doing what?

Because here is the thing. If “full employment” is the goal, we solved that problem centuries ago. Slaves had full employment. Prisoners have full employment. Peasants in medieval Europe had full employment. Children working in coal mines had full employment. Nobody looks back at those situations and thinks, “what a golden age of economic achievement.”

Full employment is trivially easy to achieve. You just have to not care about what people are actually producing.

The Goal You Forgot About

The entire point of an economy is production. Making stuff people want. Growing food, building houses, inventing medicine, creating technology, providing services. The purpose is output – goods and services that improve human lives.

Employment is a means to that end. It is not the end itself. Confusing the two is like saying the goal of a hospital is to keep doctors busy. No. The goal of a hospital is to heal patients. If you could heal every patient with half the staff, that would be a triumph, not a crisis.

Every invention in human history exists because someone figured out how to get more results with less effort. The wheel. The plow. The printing press. The steam engine. The computer. Every single one of these was a labor-saving device. That is literally the point. Economic progress means doing more with less. Fewer people growing more food. Fewer workers building more houses. Fewer hours producing more goods.

If full employment were truly the goal, we should ban all of these inventions. Go back to carrying water in buckets. Plow fields by hand. Copy books with quills. Full employment achieved. Everyone is working. Everyone is also poor, hungry, and miserable.

Prisons and Dictators Got There First

Let me give you the most uncomfortable examples of full employment.

North Korea has full employment. Everyone has a job assigned by the state. The economy produces almost nothing. People starve. But hey – zero unemployment.

The Soviet Union had full employment. There was a famous joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Factories produced goods nobody wanted. Stores had empty shelves. But the unemployment number looked fantastic on paper.

Hitler achieved full employment in the 1930s. He did it by building a war machine. Every German had a job – manufacturing tanks, guns, ammunition, and bombs. The economy was “fully employed” right up until it was fully destroyed.

Coercion always produces full employment. You just point a gun at people and tell them to dig holes. Or fill out forms. Or stand in a field. The number goes to zero. Mission accomplished. Everyone is miserable, nothing useful gets made, but the statistic looks great.

This is what happens when you worship the metric instead of the thing the metric is supposed to measure.

The Make-Work Disease

Once you accept “jobs” as the goal instead of “production,” you start tolerating insane things.

You tolerate government programs measured entirely by how many people they employ, with zero attention to what those people actually produce. A program that hires 10,000 people to do work that 2,000 could handle is considered a success – because look at all those jobs. The fact that 8,000 people are doing nothing useful is not discussed.

You tolerate corporate bureaucracies where entire departments exist to produce reports that nobody reads, attend meetings that decide nothing, and manage processes that accomplish nothing. These people are “employed.” They have titles, desks, email signatures. They are also doing work that would not be missed if it disappeared tomorrow.

COVID proved this accidentally. When offices shut down, many companies discovered that layers of middle management, entire departments of “coordinators” and “facilitators” and “liaisons,” could vanish without any measurable impact on actual output. Some companies got more productive with fewer people. That should have been a wake-up call. Instead, everyone pretended not to notice and went back to the office.

You tolerate the gig economy creating millions of “jobs” that are really just one old job split into four worse ones. A person who used to work one full-time warehouse job now drives for a delivery app in the morning, does task work in the afternoon, and delivers food at night. Three jobs! Triple the employment! Except they make less money, have no benefits, and produce no more value than they did before. But the jobs number looks great.

Politicians Sell Employment, Not Production

Notice something about political language. Politicians pass “Full Employment” bills. They create “Jobs Programs.” They establish “Job Training” initiatives. They campaign on “job creation.”

Nobody passes a “Full Production” bill. Nobody campaigns on “maximizing output.” Nobody says, “I promise to make the economy so efficient that we produce twice as much with half the workforce.” That would be economic progress. That would also be political suicide.

Because voters hear “fewer jobs” and panic, even if the trade-off is “way more stuff and higher living standards for everyone.” The means has become the end. We are so obsessed with whether people are employed that we forgot to ask whether they are producing anything.

This is how you get bridges to nowhere. Highways nobody drives on. Government buildings nobody uses. Military equipment the military did not ask for but Congress funded anyway because the factory is in someone’s district. These projects are not evaluated on whether they produce value. They are evaluated on how many jobs they “create.” The jobs are the point. The bridge is an afterthought.

What Actually Matters

Here is the question nobody asks: would it be better to have everyone employed doing useless work, or to have maximum production with some people temporarily between jobs?

The answer is obvious when you think about it for five seconds. If the economy is producing at maximum capacity – if every factory, farm, office, and service is operating at peak efficiency – then the total wealth of the society is maximized. If some people are temporarily unemployed during that process, you can easily support them from the surplus. A highly productive economy can afford generous safety nets. A fully employed but unproductive economy cannot afford anything, because there is nothing to distribute.

It would literally be better to pay people to do nothing than to pay them to do make-work that actively disorganizes production. When you force-hire unnecessary workers into a production process, you do not just waste their wages. You slow everything down. You create coordination overhead. You generate busywork that real workers have to navigate around. The make-work does not just fail to help. It actively hurts.

Think about a kitchen. Five cooks can make excellent food for a restaurant. If you hire fifteen cooks for the same kitchen because you want to “create jobs,” you do not get three times the food. You get chaos. People bumping into each other. Conflicting instructions. Wasted ingredients. The food gets worse, not better. And everyone, including the extra cooks, has a miserable time.

Progress Means Less Work, Not More

Here is something people forget. Economic progress has been systematically reducing the amount of work humans need to do. And that is a good thing.

Two hundred years ago, children worked in factories. We eliminated child labor. That was millions of “jobs” destroyed. Nobody thinks that was bad.

A hundred years ago, elderly people worked until they died. We created retirement. Millions more “jobs” gone. Nobody thinks that was bad either.

Fifty years ago, the vast majority of women worked in the home because one income could not support a family AND households required enormous manual labor just to function. Washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, and frozen food eliminated millions of hours of household work. That freed women to enter the workforce on their own terms – not because they had to scrub laundry by hand for eight hours a day.

The work week itself has shrunk. From six days to five. From twelve hours to eight. We produce vastly more per hour than our grandparents did. That is why we can work less and live better. That is the entire point of economic progress.

If “full employment” were the goal, all of this was a mistake. We should bring back child labor, eliminate retirement, ban washing machines, and go back to six-day, twelve-hour work weeks. Unemployment would drop to zero. Everyone would be employed. Everyone would also be miserable, exhausted, and poor.

The Metric That Matters

Stop asking “how many jobs did we create?” Start asking “how much did we produce?”

Stop measuring economic success by employment numbers. Start measuring it by living standards. How much can a median family afford? How many hours do they need to work to buy food, housing, healthcare, education? What is the quality of the goods and services available to ordinary people?

By those measures, the times of greatest economic progress were the times when the most labor was being saved. When tractors replaced farm hands, food got cheaper. When robots replaced assembly line workers, cars got cheaper. When software replaced clerks, services got cheaper. Employment shifted, but production exploded. And everyone got richer.

The times of worst economic performance were the times when make-work was maximized. When Soviet factories employed ten people to do one person’s job. When railroad regulations required crews twice as large as needed. When construction rules forced three workers to do what one could handle. Full employment, empty shelves.

The Takeaway

The goal of an economy is not to keep everyone busy. It is to produce the most possible value with the least possible effort. That is what raises living standards. That is what makes life better. That is what lets us eliminate child labor, create retirement, shorten the work week, and still live better than kings did two centuries ago.

Full employment is not an achievement. Production is. Every time someone tells you they will “create jobs,” ask them: jobs doing what? Producing what? For whom? At what cost?

If the answer is “it does not matter, as long as people are employed” – that person is selling you a prison economy with better marketing. Full employment where nothing gets produced is not prosperity. It is poverty with a paycheck.

The real measure of economic success is not whether everyone has a job. It is whether the economy produces enough that everyone can live well – including the people between jobs. Chase production, and employment takes care of itself. Chase employment, and you get make-work, waste, and stagnation dressed up in a suit and a good unemployment number.