"Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true."
"But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones."
"These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”"
and goes on to come to the following conclusion: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error. But it is the only explanation for why, despite our technological capacities, we are not all working 3-4 hour days."
Having just done Fritjof Capra's Systems View of Life course, channeling the ideas that:
a) "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" [2]
and
b) "All behaviour in complex systems is emergent"
A (vastly simplified) argument is that bullshit jobs is the emergent behaviour from a system compromising between the needs of:
a) People to work so they can earn money, be fulfilled and see a material increase in their wealth.
b) A political class keen to keep the workers busy less they revolt and upset the system.
c) A system of economics/a reductionist western/scientific worldview that increasingly externalised anything that didn't show everyone was better off (e.g. GDP).
d) Elites who were increasingly happy to take an increasing proportion of the wealth from the efficiency gains.
Everyone wins in relation to the amount of power they have relative to everyone else and the system sustains itself based on the fact no-one with enough power has enough incentive/will to overthrow it. Obviously the planet (which once indigenous peoples had been conquered) mostly lost it's voice in the conversation and so that's why we're where we are now.
[1] https://evonomics.com/why-capitalism-creates-pointless-jobs-...