If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels
Not Friedman’s line — an anonymous joke from 1901UnknownFirst recorded 20 September 1901 · The Chicago Daily Tribune, crediting the Philadelphia Public Ledger
Quote Investigator traces the anecdote to an unsigned 1901 newspaper item in which an anonymous onlooker in Philadelphia, watching a steam shovel, asks why not hire a thousand men and give them teaspoons; the punchline has since been pinned on at least six different people in five countries. Milton Friedman is credibly reported by friends to have told a version of it, but the earliest credit to him is an unsourced blog post of 6 December 2006, three weeks after his death, and the first in a book is The End of Prosperity in 2008. No Friedman-sourced instance has been produced — every version on record is a second-hand recollection published after he died.
“If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels” credited to Milton Friedman, but the joke was in print by 1901, eleven years before he was born. Earliest known telling: an anonymous onlooker in The Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 September 1901. Earliest credit to Friedman: an unsourced blog post of 6 December 2006, three weeks after his death; the first in a book is The End of Prosperity (2008). Research: Quote Investigator. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Oh, I see. I thought you were trying to build a canal. If you really want to create jobs, then by all means give these men spoons, not shovels.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Milton Friedman. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
Evoking the themes of work, doubt and power. Theme: "If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
Where the joke actually comes from
Earliest documented telling
“They Saw the Point,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 September 1901, p. 12 — credited to the Philadelphia Public Ledger
Speaker in that version
An unnamed bystander watching a steam shovel on North Broad Street, Philadelphia. The implement he proposes is a teaspoon.
First Friedman credit in print
Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore and Peter J. Tanous, The End of Prosperity (Threshold Editions, 2008), p. 204 — published two years after Friedman’s death
Primary Friedman source
None located. Every Friedman version on record is a second-hand recollection published by someone else.
As the big shovel at one lick scooped up a whole cartload of dirt and dumped it upon a gondola car, one of the Irishmen remarked: “What a shame, to think of them digging up dirt in that way!” … “Well,” said the other, “that machine is taking the bread out of the mouths of a hundred laborers who could do the work with their picks and shovels.” … Just then a man who had been looking on and who had overheard the conversation remarked: “See here, you fellows. If that digging would give work to a hundred men with shovels and picks, why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons with which to dig up the dirt?”
1901 · The Chicago Daily Tribune
Note what is missing: no economist, no canal, no India, no Friedman. Note also the wording. The two Friedman-credited versions that appear in a book or a newspaper — The End of Prosperity (2008) and Stephen Moore’s Wall Street Journal column of 29 May 2009 — both end “spoons, not shovels.” The tidier “instead of shovels” construction is the older and commoner one: Aberhart used it in 1935 (“spoons and forks instead of picks and shovels”), the 6 December 2006 blog post used it, George Will used it on ABC in December 2009 (“why don’t you give them spoons instead of shovels?”), and Quote Investigator chose it for its own article headline.
1901 — The oldest telling Quote Investigator has located appears in The Chicago Daily Tribune on 20 September, credited to the Philadelphia Public Ledger. Two out-of-work Irishmen watch a steam shovel on North Broad Street; an unnamed bystander asks why not get a thousand men and give them teaspoons. Everyone in the story is anonymous (Quote Investigator ↗).
1935 — The Alberta Social Credit leader William Aberhart, complaining that public works crews were handed picks and shovels to stretch the job, replies “why not give them spoons and forks instead of picks and shovels” (The Lethbridge Herald, 18 May 1935). He tells a version again in a Canadian Club speech in Toronto that September (Quote Investigator ↗).
1967 — Lord Ritchie-Calder gives the Lords a London version: unemployed men watch a muck-shifter at Park Royal, one says the machine has cost hundreds of jobs, and another answers “Yes, mate … or for millions of men with tea spoons” (Hansard, 3 May 1967 ↗).
2008–2009 — Friedman’s name arrives last. The End of Prosperity (p. 204) reports him saying it in India in the 1960s; Stephen Moore repeats it in The Wall Street Journal in May 2009 as an unnamed Asian country; George Will tells it on ABC that December. Quote Investigator finds no earlier Friedman credit (Quote Investigator ↗).
The 1901 newspaper text quoted above is long out of copyright and free to reuse. The modern sentence people actually circulate is not: both documented Friedman-credited wordings first appear in copyrighted publications — The End of Prosperity (Threshold Editions, 2008, p. 204) and Stephen Moore’s Wall Street Journal column of 29 May 2009 — so treat the popular form as a short attributed excerpt, not as public-domain text.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Six people, five countries, one joke
This is a floating anecdote — a joke with a slot in it where a famous name goes. Quote Investigator finds versions set in the United States, Canada, England, China and India, with the punchline handed to a Princeton professor, a Canadian party leader, an unemployed Londoner, a British agriculture minister, an unnamed businessman and, eventually, Milton Friedman.
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The version everyone quotesMilton Friedman Popularised, not coined
The first credit to Friedman that Quote Investigator has located is The End of Prosperity (2008), where Laffer, Moore and Tanous recall him describing a canal in India in the 1960s: “If you really want to create jobs, then by all means give these men spoons, not shovels.” Stephen Moore’s Wall Street Journal column of 29 May 2009 tells it as “an Asian country.” The setting is not stable across retellings, which is the signature of a joke acquiring a famous name rather than a memory being reported (Quote Investigator ↗).
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Already circulating before the booksAn unsourced blog post December 2006
A version was in print under Friedman’s name within three weeks of his death on 16 November 2006: an economics blog post dated 6 December 2006 has him spotting road builders on an unnamed overseas trip and asking “Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” No source is given, and no country is named (Internet Archive capture ↗).
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An earlier named tellerWilliam Aberhart 1935
The Alberta Social Credit leader delivered the line himself, in his own voice, in May 1935 — “why not give them spoons and forks instead of picks and shovels” — and again in a Toronto speech that September, in different words: “It would probably be just as well to give them spoons and forks; it would take them still longer to do it.” Quote Investigator treats this as substantive evidence that Aberhart told the anecdote, not that he invented it (Quote Investigator ↗).
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An earlier named teller stillWalter Augustus Wyckoff 1908
A 1908 Evening Star item credits the Princeton “tramp professor” with recounting the exchange — “if this steam diggin’ would give work to 500 men with shovels, why not get 5,000 men with teaspoons for the job?” Quote Investigator notes that the time delay makes this attribution uncertain (Quote Investigator ↗).
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Tellers with no name at allA businessman in China, an unemployed Londoner, a UK Minister of Agriculture, an unnamed economist under Mao 1921–2007
Between the Canadian and American versions the joke also ran through Building Age in 1921, the Irish Dáil in 1966, the House of Lords in 1967, the Cato Journal in 1996 and The Economist in 2007 — where the magazine itself flagged it as “perhaps apocryphal” and left the economist unnamed, a year after Friedman’s death (Quote Investigator ↗).
✓The oldest version anyone has found has no famous name in it at all: an anonymous onlooker on a Philadelphia sidewalk in 1901, and the implement is a teaspoon (Quote Investigator ↗).
Context
Why this one sticks to Friedman
The joke works because it inverts a policy argument in a single move: if employment is the goal rather than the canal, then inefficiency is the point, and there is no logical floor to how inefficient you should be. That is a genuinely Friedmanite move, and it is the reason his name fits the slot so comfortably. But the reasoning was doing its work in newspapers in 1901, eleven years before Friedman was born, when the machine everyone was arguing about was a steam shovel and the men holding the picks were standing on North Broad Street in Philadelphia.
What changes over a century is only the cast. The technology updates — steam shovel, road machine, tractor, mechanical digger — and the famous name attaches late, once the anecdote needs an authority to carry it. By the time it reaches Friedman, even the country stops being fixed: India in the 2008 book, an unspecified Asian country in the 2009 newspaper column, Asia on television that December, China in retellings a decade later. A remembered conversation tends to keep its geography. A joke does not.
It was in print eleven years before Milton Friedman was born.
What Quote Investigator actually concludes
Quote Investigator’s conclusion is carefully worded, and this page does not go past it: “There is substantive evidence that William Aberhart and Milton Friedman told versions of this anecdote, but it was already in circulation.” That is a claim about retelling, not about origin — and it is the honest ceiling on what the record supports.
The gap that matters is a documentary one. Friedman was among the most heavily recorded economists who ever lived: decades of books, columns, lectures, congressional testimony and television. If the line were his, there ought to be a Friedman-sourced instance somewhere in that archive. None has been produced. Every version on record is somebody else remembering him saying it, and all of those recollections were published after he died.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1912–2006 · American economist · Nobel laureate in economics, 1976
Milton Friedman was the most influential free-market economist of the twentieth century: a University of Chicago monetarist, an adviser to presidents, and winner of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was also an unusually gifted popular communicator — through Capitalism and Freedom and the television series Free to Choose — which is precisely why loose free-market aphorisms drift toward his name. The spoons line is one of them. People who knew him remembered him telling it, and it fits his argument about make-work programmes exactly; but it was a stock newspaper joke decades before he could have coined it, and his own published work does not contain it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented instance
"They Saw the Point." The Chicago Daily Tribune, September 20, 1901, p. 12, col. 4 (credited to the Philadelphia Public Ledger). Identified as the earliest located instance in Garson O'Toole, "Quote Origin: If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels," Quote Investigator, October 10, 2011. First attribution to Milton Friedman: Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous, The End of Prosperity (New York: Threshold Editions, 2008), 204.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels’?” Last verified 7 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-want-jobs-then-give-these-workers-spoons-instead-of/