The First taxi. “We’ve got traditional measures of how society is doing, and one we’ve relied on for the last 80 years is the unemployment rate,” Green says. “But that may not be telling us the real story about the quality of life of citizens in the way it was 20 years ago because of the changing nature of work.” A zero-hours contract, for example, may be ‘employment’, but it may not be very good at building social progress.