This brings to mind a larger question: what percentage of the human race is presently being paid to do useless work?
"I find myself coming back to the view that many previously employed workers simply have a current marginal product pretty close to zero."
We have an economy which is predicated on cheap energy. As such it's frequently cheaper to produce goods by comparitively inefficient automated processes due to the reduction in manpower required, or to produce goods at distance from their end user as the reduction of labour costs from a remote supplier outweights the transportation costs.
It seems plausible that an energy scarce world could reverse the economics of both situations. It would have enough other consequences that I'm not at all suggesting it as some sort of worker's utopia, but greater employment may be an interesting side-effect.
This does not mean they're incapable of doing valuable work. It just means they haven't yet finished the transition from whatever no-value-added position they were in to a value-added position.
In the former case - every employee is doing useful work. The latter definition is way more restrictive.
A central fallacy of present-day economics is the assumption that all economic activity is of equal value. GDP is a good example: A million dollars spent on healthcare increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on war increases GDP by a million. A million dollars spent on rubber dog crap increases GDP by a million. But these transactions are not of equal value.
I personally think that economic central planners and GDP growth targets are a major underlying cause of all this useless make-work. I call it the gerbil wheel economy.
Run, gerbil, run! Gotta make the opaque meaningless numbers bigger!
You can see it very clearly in very centrally planned economies that worship GDP growth, like China. They have entire abandoned cities-- things built for nobody, just to make opaque numbers bigger.
My point isn't that all dollars spent are equal, but that the world is so complicated that it is not easy to make a snap judgement about where the next big difference will come from.
Actually, they are. The folks who spent a million dollars on rubber dog crap could have spent it on something else but they spent it on rubber dog crap. That million dollars is the value of that rubber dog crap.
I mean yes you could argue that it might contribute to a class divide, but I think orthodontic treatment is much more affordable for the middle class than it was 20 years ago.
Maybe you meant cosmetic dentistry, but even there, should we forever brand someone who didn't take care of their teeth earlier in life? What about folks who were given tetracycline when they were kids (which permanently stains their teeth)?
Maybe there's a good example in dentistry, but let's see one.
As to your "positional" argument, how are you separating out the "bad" positional change from "her teeth kept us from seeing his superior skills"? Or, is the latter also bad?
-> 80 % Survival mode, Struggling to meet ends (The so-called 3rd World, mostly)
-> 15 % Semi-Ok, Hired hands in private and governmental institutions of various size (in-debted wage slaves, mostly)
-> 5 % Ok, successful business owners, top managers, political leaders, rich and super-rich (various business sizes, amounts, market caps, etc... imagine any metric indicating financial and social success)
If this picture is mostly right => Perhaps, the really useless work isn't something which is rightly measured as the global number of humans busy with it.
The distribution is only going to get worse. I don't see the 0.1% at the top suddenly growing altruistic -- nor do I think any sort of political disruption can change this tendency in the long term. Such disruptions now seem to, more often than not, result in more assets being secured by those of means.
Whatever illusions of a democratic and fair society the 1900s instilled in us are just that: illusions. I predict that within my lifetime western society will indeed continue a trend towards the sci-fi predicions of the privately owned corporate state. To a large degree, this is already reality.
The ultimate issue should lie with the mechanisms used to drive that $28k+%return in value. If that mechanism is the Google organic funnel -> AdSense revenues, and if your demand is for quality content, isn't Google more of the problem than AOL? AOL is trying to survive and compete in a landscape where bad articles written on the cheap produce a higher aggregate value than quality articles written by authors who command a higher wage.
I wouldn't want to operate a business the way AOL does or the way Demand Media does, but if there is such a huge area of Google and search engines available for gaming, it's going to be gamed. There is too much incentive for some entity not to step in and profit.
(getting on a soapbox here) I think it's easy to forget that we don't use the capitalist system because it is somehow morally right and pure - it's because so far as we know, it's what works best to motivate people to generate real value for humanity as a whole. If the system stops working, then you tweak it - which is why we have regulation on things like monopolies, for example. In this case, google has changed the system for us, and for that I'm very glad - incentives are now more aligned with producing quality content that's actually useful to someone.
I mean look for popular headlines, terms etc construct nonsense pages and you will have a good chance of getting up there.