Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley
&gt; &quot;There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”&quot;<p>Although a valid concern putting &quot;job creation&quot; as a goal for governments can (and in a lot of occurrences in recent history, did) backfire spectacularly.<p>In the most reductive analogy it creates incentive for the government to create &quot;hole diggers&quot; and &quot;hole fillers&quot; type of jobs that, in aggregate, generate very few useful work while fulfilling this basic goal of job creation.<p>I believe this &quot;job creation as priority&quot; approach is inferior to both the &quot;laissez-faire&quot; capitalist alternative and the &quot;basic income&quot; social democratic one.<p>As an example of its dangers it suffices to see the kafkaesque process of fund allocation (and sourcing) for the public funded aerospace industry, both the military procurement (fighter jets, bombers) and the civilian NASA one.