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Comment by orange-mentor | Hacker News Reader

History teaches us things can change fast. Think USSR in 1984. At some point things are going to give.

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?

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We just gotta keep spending more of other people's money and properity will be sure to come.

It is a good thing that we have an economy where there are jobs for people to do things that 'don't need to be done'. This is the only way that a highly specialized capitalist society can provide income and purpose for everyone, and drive further innovation. People need income and jobs, even as we add more automation. As long as our society produces enough basic needs to actually support people, it is better that people are doing 'unnecessary' jobs rather than being unemployed as the result of automation.

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)

>It is a good thing that we have an economy where there are jobs for people to do things that 'don't need to be done'. This is the only way that a highly specialized capitalist society can provide income and purpose for everyone, and drive further innovation. People need income and jobs, even as we add more automation.

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.

Well yes, the optimum number of full time jobs in a household is >=1 and <2. This isn't really a function of useless jobs existing or not, but more of a function of CoL and income distribution.

COL is itself a function of the prevalence of useless jobs. They increase the cost of everything, they increase the need for infrastructure, they create friction for real work, etc.

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.

Innovation? Really? All meaningful advancements come from public funding of basic research.

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.

I didn't mean "innovation" as in "novel and groundbreaking technical innovation". Innovation that is meaningful and valuable to society can be as simple as generating art, music, ideas, cultural contributions, etc.

> 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.

Your rejoinder is valid, but I don't think the problem at this point is jobs that don't need to be done. I think the problem is jobs that do things that should not be done.

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 agree 100%. Not all BS jobs are good BS jobs. The ideal BS jobs are ones that do something productive that has a positive influence. The worst kind are the ones that are rent-seeking.

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.

Romans had the technical means to integrate all the Barbarians crossing their borders, but they didn't. A lot of American Politicians who are waving Mexican Flags today would be welcoming in their new Barbarian constituency as Roman politicians. After all Barbarians were Rome's strength, they just wanted to work jobs regular Romans didn't want to do. They are just moving for a better quality of life. Economic Migration into Rome.

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