Its Friday and I am writing a short blog only. A lot of people I meet find it hard to understand what a cost is in economics. They are too accounting oriented, in the sense that think a dollar sign on a piece of paper (such as a fiscal statement) represents a cost. In some contexts, it is sensible to think about dollars but when considering what a government should do, the only thing that really matters is the real resource cost. That may be calibrated in dollar terms but is not a monetary amount. In walking around three large Italian cities in the last week (Florence, Rome and Milan) I saw a lot of idle resources. The real costs of this idleness are massive – lost production, lost real income, lost lives. I saw many people not working and many others trying to scratch out an income selling trinkets on street corners. I also saw rubbish and urban decay everywhere such that the urban amenity was severely diminished. I didn’t see a shortage of productive jobs that could be done to improve the civic (public) parts of Italian life. But no-one was doing them. Why? The potential jobs were latent only because there was no-one willing to pay the idle workers to perform these productive tasks. That happens when there is a shortage of spending and has nothing to do with structural parameters.