I thought they were unemployed. They did not appear as unemployed on any record, but the actual unemployment in France and throughout Europe, was enormous. For every purchase in a French department store, something like an hour's time was unemployed; millions of hours a day. And the cashiers, the filing clerks, the watchers of those records, never did a stroke of productive work.
In her book "The Discovery Of Freedom," Rose Wilder Lane reflects on the hidden unemployment crisis in France and across Europe. She notes that while individuals may not be officially listed as unemployed, the actual number of idle workers is staggering. Each purchase in a store symbolizes a significant amount of unproductive time, revealing the deeper economic issues beneath the surface.
Lane highlights a troubling paradox where many jobs do not contribute to genuine productivity. The cashiers and clerks, who are ostensibly employed, end up not engaging in meaningful work, and the cumulative effect is millions of lost hours each day, painting a bleak picture of the labor market that goes unnoticed in official statistics.
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