A little over a year ago, when someone in the political directorate or an industrial engineering obeah man close to the PM’s inner sanctum sold the prime minister the deluded idea that making a special appeal to employers islandwide to add just one more person to their payroll (Jamaica Employ) would result in 40,000 new jobs in the short term, and she announced it as a major policy objective, I immediately saw it for what it was and criticised it as economic and political junk and a sick joke.

Certainly, I thought, there had to have been enough men and women in the Cabinet and environs with degrees in economics and real-time experience in political economy to have told the prime minister that moral suasion is not a great motivator or a line item on any business (except the Evangelical movement), and capitalism doesn’t quite work that way.

To the many hundreds of graduates of our universities and multiple thousands of our high school-leavers, that was an absolute insult. But…

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