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Why you can trust SCMP
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FROM YESTERDAY'S newspaper here is an item that implies more than it says - and most of what it implies is questionable.

The headline was 'Disney rail link to create 1,000 jobs, says MTRC'. We had a good headline writer there to tell you as much in nine words as the hundreds of words underneath.

But let's probe a little deeper into it anyway. The first point is that these jobs the Mass Transit Railway Corp would 'create' by building a 3.2 kilometre railway line are not permanent ones. They are construction jobs. Finish one when a project is finished and you have to hunt for your next one all over again.

This is a minor quibble, however. The real thing to notice is the implied argument that we should build the Disney line because it would create jobs in a time of high (by Hong Kong standards) unemployment and creation of jobs, as everyone knows, is the benchmark of economic success.

You would almost think that the line itself was only a by-product of job creation, the ultimate objective.

I have used the analogy before but it is time to invoke it again. If this reasoning were valid there is an instant remedy for our unemployment problem. We could immediately begin construction of three MTR Corp tunnels from the southern tip of Lamma Island to Antarctica. They would be dug by hand alone on three shifts round the clock, thus creating jobs for all of our 172,000 jobless.

It does not matter that these tunnels would never be finished. They would achieve their objective of job creation and, by never being finished, would in fact ensure that these jobs were permanent ones. Nor would you need to worry that this waste would damage our economy. Just think, as our bureaucrats do, in measuring economic performance only by immediate numbers for gross domestic product. The tunnel projects would all be represented in the numbers as gross fixed capital formation, high grade GDP.

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