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1 " Smartass Disciple: Master, I want to eradicate all corruptions in this world.Master of Stupidity: Let it be a bit! Otherwise you'll make us jobless for good. "
― Toba Beta
2 " Eric, you need to look at the whole picture," the PM said. " You look at the jobless as a huge pile of scrap and you're looking for what can be recycled. That's good. That's your job. But what you don't realise is that this pile of scrap itself serves a purpose. I need my zeros, Eric. They put fear in people; fear of crime and terrorism. They are a stark reminder to the stakeholders that what they despise today, they may end up joining tomorrow. It keeps them obedient. Remember that! "
3 " Maddie had seen commercials for Match Made Easy on TV. They seemed like a decent business and legit. She hoped. She prayed they weren't out of her price range. Not that it mattered - time was running out. She'd pay anything to prove to her family she wasn't cursed. Plus, Ryan would be there, most likely with that cheating blonde of his. She bet anything they'd both love to see her at her lowest point: jobless and dateless. Well, no one was going to feel sorry for her. Not her cousin and certainly not the best man, either. She'd show them all. And since she couldn't find a wedding date to her sister's wedding on her own, it looked as if she'd be forced to do the next best thing. Hire one. "
― Jennifer Shirk , Wedding Date for Hire (Anyone But You, #2)
4 " That's how life works. You know it when you know it.They're nineteen and in love. Alone except for each other. Jobless and homeless, looking for something, somewhere, anywhere here.They're on a sixteen-line highway.Driving west. "
― James Frey , Bright Shiny Morning
5 " Some people believe labor-saving technological change is bad for the workers because it throws them out of work. This is the Luddite fallacy, one of the silliest ideas to ever come along in the long tradition of silly ideas in economics. Seeing why it's silly is a good way to illustrate further Solow's logic.The original Luddites were hosiery and lace workers in Nottingham, England, in 1811. They smashed knitting machines that embodied new labor-saving technology as a protest against unemployment (theirs), publicizing their actions in circulars mysteriously signed " King Ludd." Smashing machines was understandable protection of self-interest for the hosiery workers. They had skills specific to the old technology and knew their skills would not be worth much with the new technology. English government officials, after careful study, addressed the Luddites' concern by hanging fourteen of them in January 1813.The intellectual silliness came later, when some thinkers generalized the Luddites' plight into the Luddite fallacy: that an economy-wide technical breakthrough enabling production of the same amount of goods with fewer workers will result in an economy with - fewer workers. Somehow it never occurs to believers in Luddism that there's another alternative: produce more goods with the same number of workers. Labor-saving technology is another term for output-per-worker-increasing technology. All of the incentives of a market economy point toward increasing investment and output rather than decreasing employment; otherwise some extremely dumb factory owners are foregoing profit opportunities. With more output for the same number of workers, there is more income for each worker.Of course, there could very well be some unemployment of workers who know only the old technology - like the original Luddites - and this unemployment will be excruciating to its victims. But workers as a whole are better off with more powerful output-producing technology available to them. Luddites confuse the shift of employment from old to new technologies with an overall decline in employment. The former happens; the latter doesn't. Economies experiencing technical progress, like Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, do not show any long-run trend toward increasing unemployment; they do show a long-run trend toward increasing income per worker.Solow's logic had made clear that labor-saving technical advance was the only way that output per worker could keep increasing in the long run. The neo-Luddites, with unintentional irony, denigrate the only way that workers' incomes can keep increasing in the long-run: labor-saving technological progress.The Luddite fallacy is very much alive today. Just check out such a respectable document as the annual Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Program. The 1996 Human Development Report frets about " jobless growth" in many countries. The authors say " jobless growth" happens whenever the rate of employment growth is not as high as the rate of output growth, which leads to " very low incomes" for millions of workers. The 1993 Human Development Report expressed the same concern about this " problem" of jobless growth, which was especially severe in developing countries between 1960 and 1973: " GDP growth rates were fairly high, but employment growth rates were less than half this." Similarly, a study of Vietnam in 2000 lamented the slow growth of manufacturing employment relative to manufacturing output. The authors of all these reports forget that having GDP rise faster than employment is called growth of income per worker, which happens to be the only way that workers " very low incomes" can increase. "
6 " Parents and schoolteachers counsel black children that, if they ever hope to escape this system and avoid prison time, they must be on their best behavior, raise their arms and spread their legs for the police without complaint, stay in failing schools, pull up their pants, and refuse all forms of illegal work and moneymaking activity, even if jobs in the legal economy are impossible to find. Girls are told not to have children until they are married to a " good" black man who can help provide for a family with a legal job. They are told to wait and wait for Mr. Right even if that means, in a jobless ghetto, never having children at all. "
7 " You'd think the sight of beautiful Place Vendôme would lift my spirits but oddly the arc of jewellery - so obviously beyond the means of a jobless person like me - only depresses me more. I plod on feeling confused, guilty even, that I should feel unhappy in a place that looks like paradise. "
― , Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris