Whenever unemployment comes down - even if only very slightly - it sounds like really good news. It's great that productive forces in the economy are growing and there’ll be a little more money in people's pockets soon. But if one gets more ambitious about , the picture gets more complicated and darker than what governments make out. means being, generally, out of work. But let’s coin a new word: . It means being in work but of a kind that fails to tackle with any real sincerity the true needs of other people: merely exciting them to and instead; the way Primark, Patek Philippe and youporn.com might. This man is misemployed: Similarly, a man employed by the Sands Casino in Las Vegas to hand out flyers to tourists in order to entice them to use slot machines is clearly 'employed' in the . He's marked as being off the unemployment registers. He is receiving a wage in return for helping to solve some small of the human condition of interest to his employers: that not enough tourists might otherwise leave the blue skies and heat of the main street to enter the air-conditioned halls of an Egyptian-themed casino. The man is indeed employed, but he’s also in truth dramatically misemployed. His labour is generating , but it is making . He is joined in the misemployment ranks by people who make cigarettes, addictive but sterile television shows, badly designed condos, ill-fitting and shoddy clothes, deceptive advertisements, artery-clogging biscuits, and highly-sugared drinks.

The rate of misemployment in modern economies is very high. While we may be genuinely grateful for any job we’re given, at the back of our minds we all - as employees - hope for something else: that our work can contribute in some real way to the ; that we can make a difference. Governments have, with some success, been learning to reduce the overall rate of unemployment. In the language of the field, they do this by 'stimulating demand.' Though technically effective, this method fails to between good and bad demand, and therefore . The real trick to bringing down the rate of misemployment isn't just to stimulate demand per se, but to stimulate : to excite people to buy the ingredients of true satisfaction, to want the things that really matter, and therefore to give individuals and businesses a chance to direct their , and make , in meaningful areas of the economy. Employment figures aren’t irrelevant - they matter a great deal. They are the first things to be attended to. But these raw figures mask a more ambitious index that we should get around to building in the future: one that measures misemployment and hence shows how intelligently and responsibly we are deploying human capital, or rather, how we're using up people’s lives.

1. Which new words/phrases were easiest to remember? Give three.

どの語句/文が覚えやすかったですか？３つ挙げてください。

2. Which words/phrases were you having a hard time to speak/understand? Give three.

どの語句/文が話したり理解するのに難しかったですか？３つ挙げてください。