You don’t need a very high proportion of the population to poison the well with bad behavior enough that everyone just accepts that as regular behavior and then even the ethical portion of your society starts engaging in the bad acts.
One of the main benefits for having a government is to go in and regulate bad behavior away that would never occur organically because each individual actor in society loses far too much trying to fix the situation on their own to rationally try.
We have the technical means to provide a decent life for everyone. And I mean everyone, including illegal immigrants sneaking across the border. And we could do all that while everyone struggles less.
So yea. Most jobs are fake and stupid and don't need to be done. The ones that need doing could be given more support, distributed more evenly.
This was a mainstream economic viewpoint less than a century ago. What happened?
Everyone is worried that automation is going to steal people's jobs, and jobs won't exist anymore, but that has already been happening in full swing for 100+ years. 'Useless' jobs are and will continue to be the solution to that problem.
(And I am using 'useless' rather tongue-in-cheek. The jobs do have real functional value, even if they're in higher parts of Maslow's hierarchy)
For most families with two parents who work, it would be better for one to stay home and tend to life and children. It's inefficient, alienating and demoralizing to have both parents forced into specialized wage labor that amounts to a useless make work.
Put another way, if society allocates more resources to people who work outside the home doing useless things, then fewer resources are available to people staying in the home doing useful things. One way this manifests is inflation, ie, higher COL.
As for "purpose"...wow. Ask the next GrubHub employee that comes to your door if it gives them purpose.
Working less should be a social goal, a targeted outcome of public policy.
> As for "purpose"...wow. Ask the next GrubHub employee that comes to your door if it gives them purpose.
I bet they have enough purpose in their life that they aren't committing violent crimes for shits and giggles.
Doctors' offices employ people whose only purpose is to be experts at navigating the byzantine insurance system. Arguing that these jobs should be preserved is the broken window fallacy. These jobs do not have real functional value. They are compensating for something that is destroying value.
Even worse is when it's not even someone's job, as in the case of individual people fighting with their insurance company to get paid what they're owed.
I wish that people in this country could get over the idea that 'jobs programs' are a bad thing. Some of the best BS jobs are artificially created, the ones that capitalism produces naturally tend to be of the rent-seeking variety.