It's tricky to compare though. Consider.

The cost of coal is mostly the cost of the raw material inputs. And coal has a significant off the books negative externalilty because of CO2 emissions and environmental destruction.

vs

Solar which has a high labor cost component. Noting that providing jobs for large numbers of lower skilled workers is an off the books positive externality.

If you want jobs, there's an enormous amount of potential employment in converting to solar. There's likely to be two or three rounds of build-out before the panels are "good enough" and stabilize in some roughly fixed form, so there may be generations of work ahead.

At some point people will have installed capacity that only needs minor maintenance and these jobs can shift to other sectors.

In what way is employing people in an offical capacity (you pay them, withhold income tax, holiday pay, health cover, superannuation (401k or whatever you call it) off the books?

Don't these data get reported to government, and worker on academic and corporate economists? Who endeavour to account for the effects of employment in an econo-socio-politio-historic evaluation of the world.

> off the books?

It's counted as a 'cost' but over the big picture it's not.

It's like this economics teaches us that labor is a cost to be minimized. All good and well except if workers have no money they can't buy anything.

Yep. If we want to employ a lot of people producing power we should just have people ride exercise bikes.

The very premise of a great Rick and Morty episode [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/embed/l2bU_tOREos?vndel=watch&vndapp...

And Black Mirror [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits