Full employment is not a goal. Our society's goal is to ensure people have access to goods and services. Unfortunately, that's hard to optimize for, so we optimize for full employment as a proxy.

> Full employment is not a goal. Our society's goal is to ensure people have access to goods and services. Unfortunately, that's hard to optimize for, so we optimize for full employment as a proxy.

I disagree, at least if democracy is also a goal. Full employment gives individual citizens economic power to go with their political power. Merely "ensur[ing] people have access to goods and services" turns them into economically disempowered dependents.

In the USA, the 65-and-over age group appears to have significantly more political power than the 18-to-24 age group, even though the latter group is much more likely to be employed. The explanation seems straightforward: older people vote at significantly higher rates than young people. In fact the economic dependency of older people seems to be a rallying cry for considering their interests; both parties will invoke "grandmothers living on fixed incomes" when they want to promote or oppose some broader policy.

Eh, you're incorrectly doing a temporal shift here....

The older group were workers. They earned income. They invested it, and now are attempting to maintain control of their investments with the last power they have, voting.

Those same young people that have jobs now, that put it in retirement, will be the old people investing in the future.