Why is it good to create jobs? I was reading this article on planned obsolescence, which states


  On a macroeconomic scale, the rapid turnover of goods powers growth and creates reams of jobs


In context, it's implied that this is good - it is good to have people working to design, market, make, and distribute goods to replace other goods that break after a short lifespan.

Naively, it seems very bad to me, compared to the option of having goods that last a long time. Those people working on making replacement goods are now not available to work at other jobs or use that time on other pursuits. If the goods lasted longer, we could spend far fewer resources, as a society, supplying everyone with goods. Then we would have many more resources (raw materials in the goods, human labor making the goods, time consumers spend comparing and purchasing new goods, etc.) available to solve other problems or take on other projects.

Yet, I almost always hear people refer to a project or industry hiring lots of people to work on it as an innately good thing, unlike all other forms of resource expenditure. (I never expect to hear that planned obsolescence has an upside because, "look at all the copper it's using!" or "it really keeps our power plants busy providing electricity for the factories!".)

Why is "jobs" treated so differently as a resource, and should I change my naive approach to thinking about them?
In general, it is not:


  Despite the focus on ‘jobism’, jobs are a cost of production and
  consumption, not a benefit, and should be minimized


Mark J. Perry @ AEI 


  Public discourse tends to be carried out in terms of jobs, as if a great objective was to create jobs. Now that’s not our objective at
  all. There’s no problem about creating jobs. We can create any number
  of jobs in having people dig holes and fill them up again. Do we want
  jobs like that? No. Jobs are a price and we have to work to live.
  Whereas if you listen to the terminology you would think that we live
  to work. Now some of us do. There are workaholics just like there are
  alcoholics and some of us do live to work. But in the main, what we
  want is not jobs, but productive jobs. We want jobs that will be able
  to produce the goods and services that we consume at a minimum
  expenditure of effort. In a way, the appropriate national objective is
  to have the fewest possible jobs. That is to say, the least amount of
  work for the greatest amount of products.


Milton Friedman in a 1980 lecture 


  Under most circumstances, wages paid to people employed on a project
  should not be counted as benefits, although this practice is
  disturbingly widespread. As mentioned above, the opportunity cost of
  labor used on a project is the output that that labor would have
  generated elsewhere, either in paid work or in household production.
  Including wages paid to labor on a project as a benefit implies that
  that labor would have produced nothing otherwise and that the agency
  making the wage payments does not have standing.


Zerbe and Bellas (page 117-118):

I say in general, because there are some evidence that "jobs are good for you", and if increasing jobs diminishes the number of long term unemployed, that might be considered a benefit, even though it diminishes the quantity of leisure and home production they consume.