If you want to measure the health of the economy, forget about “employment”

Work dominates pretty much everything. Whether or not you have it, it’s probably taking up most of your time. Employment is the most-common indicator of economic health and nearly all of the public debate about economics has to do with creating jobs. If you don’t work, it can have a detrimental impact on your health and your cognitive capacities. And with the automation of cognitive as well as physical labour many people think their jobs are useless, and it looks likely that many kinds of jobs are going to be become increasingly scarce. So maybe we need to rethink what it means to work and the role of work in our society.