"... A123 expects the combined plants ... would ... create over 14,000 jobs." . http://www.reason.com/news/show/122019.html http://www.reason.com/news/show/12

"... A123 expects the combined plants ... would ... create over 14,000 jobs." . http://www.reason.com/news/show/122019.html http://www.reason.com/news/show/122019.html Economists have been at war with the make-work bias for centuries. The 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat ridiculed the equation of prosperity with jobs as "Sisyphism," after the mythological fully employed Greek who was eternally condemned to roll a boulder up a hill. In the eyes of the public, he wrote, "effort itself constitutes and measures wealth. To progress is to increase the ratio of effort to result. Its ideal may be represented by the toil of Sisyphus, at once barren and eternal." For the economist, by contrast, wealth "increases proportionately to the increase in the ratio of result to effort. Absolute perfection, whose archetype is God, consists [of] a situation in which no effort at all yields infinite results."