… is from pages 40-41 of my colleague Bryan Caplan’s brilliant 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter (original emphases; footnote deleted):
The public often literally believes that labor is better to use than conserve. Saving labor, producing more goods with fewer man-hours, is widely perceived not as progress, but as a danger. I call this make-work bias, a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor. Where noneconomists see the destruction of jobs, economists see the essence of economic growth – the production of more with less.
….
For an individual to prosper, he only needs to have a job. But society can only prosper if individuals do a job, if they create goods and services that someone wants.
DBx: The good economist judges international trade by how much labor and other resources it saves. The non-economist (or poor economist) judges international trade by how much labor and other resources it devours.
