If the goal is to reduce the amount of not-producing-anything that people are doing, then it’s relatively easy to think of ways to give people jobs doing not-nothing. If you think that you’re a country that’s actually suffering from an acute shortage of stuff (consider India) then you need to pay a lot of attention to getting good value from your public expenditures. But if you’re a country that’s suffering from an acute shortage of jobs, then even things that asymptotically approach pure makework are better than nothing.
Matthew Yglesias, http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/09/291970/the-era-of-trade-surplus-envy
