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Comment by lewis500 | Hacker News Reader

“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must justify his right to exist.”

This is a framing designed to get attention but is obviously empty. "We" don't "invent" jobs. There isn't some big council of job inventors we all sit on with the purpose of giving everyone a right to exist. People and organizations decide to hire people for various reasons, and people sign up to be hired---usually so they can make money. Jobs are agreements between people. This is true even of government jobs in a democratic society: people are hired by various government agencies which, with a couple of jobfare exceptions, hire people for reasons of their own---not because of a mandate to make up jobs for people. This is a plea to an imaginary decision-maker.

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Eh. Supply and demand matters. There's a supply of labor even for bullshit jobs, in part because of a lack of reasonable alternatives to having a job. If there was something people could do that didn't pose a direct threat to their own safety that didn't involve "job" (you know, like UBI), then jobs would have to compete much harder for employees - better wages, or more importantly, being intrinsically rewarding.

Of course, it's quite possible for the supply of workers to exceed the demand for workers. It's not a pretty sight - read up on the Great Depression for example. And that seems to be exactly where we're headed right now. People who once worked in jobs that no longer exist thanks to technological advance and market forces, who have no alternative ways to make a living, and are getting shamed as lazy moochers for it. That's how revolutions happen.

There may be a supply of labor for such jobs, but why is there a demand for it?

If I run a company, my goal is not to hire a bunch of people to do useless "work". I want as few such people as possible, not just because I have to pay them, but also because they slow everyone else down doing the work that actually earns money. In a capitalist economy where inefficient firms can go bankrupt, why is there demand for people who will do useless work?

One possible answer is that we don't actually live in a capitalist society - that government influence prevents real capitalism from happening. There is some truth to that position, but I doubt that people who promote the "useless jobs" theory think that less government involvement is the solution.

I think the correct answer is that the "useless jobs" theory is flawed. No company is deliberately hiring people to do useless work. (Some empire-building managers within companies may do so, however.) The jobs are useless because of inefficiency in the company, not by design, and a more efficient company would find something real for those people to do.

I think "useless" doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit the employer, but rather that it doesn't benefit the employee, and it arguably doesn't benefit society.

It benefits the employee. That's what a paycheck is.

What I think you're trying to say is that the employee doesn't perceive any meaning in the job. And if you do mean that, I can whole-heartedly agree with you.

And, arguably, the employee can't perceive any meaning in the job because they can see that the job doesn't benefit society in any meaningful way.

It's not clear to me what the solution is, either.

Whatever the solution is, we need to get to it, and fast. I've been reading Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People (among other books), and it is terrifying. We are poised to shed tens of millions more jobs (in addition to the millions we've already lost) in the next decade or two, due to virtually every repetitive job (what he distinguishes as routine, rather than non-routine) being replaced by robots that do it faster and better for less money. And there is nothing on the horizon to replace them, to provide an alternative income for the millions of truck drivers, fast food workers, call center operators, retail clerks, insurance agents, paralegals, even doctors who are about to become obsolete.

And if the answer to this dilemma is to throw them out on the streets because they're obviously lazy and/or stupid, exploiting our hard-earned tax dollars with their immoral ways - or to just keep swelling the ranks of unemployment and disability and "retraining" programs that will never lead anywhere - then the people who are still able to make it are going to face some very nasty shocks.

It's easy to tell who's pulling their weight in a company of a couple dozen, but beyond that it's near impossible. And frankly what I've seen is that a company is more likely to use it's capital to block competition than to become more efficient. And even efforts that are on their face about becoming more efficient like layoffs, instead tend to be more about internal power struggles than gaining efficiency.

If supply and demand matters then it would seem employment does not exist because of societal wish for people to justify their existence with madeup jobs, but rather because of many independent decisions between workers and employers. This was my point.

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