Don Grant, who contributed the letter “Build something” (Jan. 21), told us he worked at a think tank in Germany during the 1970s but failed to tell us what he built there. He shocked us by suggesting that after our present recession ends, if it ends, we will have huge numbers of unnecessary, parasitic jobs in our dying, preposterous service economy and a consequent surplus of human beings. He asked, “So what do we choose to do with people who are quite simply of no use to the economy of the near future?”
I hope most people do not value other people according only to economic success. There is plenty of real work that real people want done in this imperfect world, as long as our government doesn’t command us toward a useless, parasitic bureaucracy. Grant should return to the think tank!
This article appears in Jan 31 – Feb 7, 2010.