http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/business/international/in-europe-fake-jobs-can-have-real-benefits.html?_r=5 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/business/international/in-europe-fake-jobs-can-have-real-benefits.html?_r=5)
"Sabine de Buyzer, working in the accounting department, leaned into her computer and scanned a row of numbers. Candelia was doing well. Its revenue that week was outpacing expenses, even counting taxes and salaries. "We have to be profitable," Ms. de Buyzer said. "Everyone's working all out to make sure we succeed."
This was a sentiment any boss would like to hear, but in this case the entire business is fake. So are Candelia's customers and suppliers, from the companies ordering the furniture to the trucking operators that make deliveries. Even the bank where Candelia gets its loans is not real."
I think I'd start a gossip tabloid and take pictures of random people and put "Kate Upton seen leaving supermarket" and so forth.
The website asks me to login so I cannot really read the article.
But, the "fake jobs saves economy" idea is what Keynes theories are all about.
Depending on the country and the place it is more or less extreme but it is present pretty much everywhere nowadays.
The very famous passage:
Quote
"If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing."
Book 3, Chapter 10, Section 6 pg.129 "The General Theory.."
So essentially bury money and let people recover it for the sake of the economy...
What I found really funny is that simply helping the poor is bad, inventing stupid jobs is fine. Even if it is pretty much the same. In either case, it is another proof of how capitalism is not working, but society tries to "patch it up" in stupid ways.
It wouldn't let me read it either, it must have been just that day then they go to the paywall.
This wasn't even Keynes, there was no actual money changing hands. People worked at fake companies with fake contacts and got no paycheck.
Quote from: lester1/2jr on June 01, 2015, 09:05:17 PMThis wasn't even Keynes, there was no actual money changing hands. People worked at fake companies with fake contacts and got no paycheck.
Ok, then it is even a new level of stupidity...