I would recommend you look into Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, where he makes an argument that 50% of American jobs are not only not-productive, but actually harmful. Your argument isn't taken to its logical conclusion yet.
There honestly isn't that much else left to do. Most of us in the western world are incredibly well fed, well housed, well transported, well educated, well defended, and well cared for(health/dental). Sure, all of that could be better and/or cheaper, but by historical standards we are doing incredibly well. We're engaging in all of these activities with only a fraction of the people that were spent on it in the past, and the people that are working directly in these fields are more productive than ever.
We're talking care of our societal needs with fewer people than ever before. What exactly do you expect the rest of us to do with our time and how will it be anything other than bullshit?
No, there's toooons of work to do. It sounds like you and yours are doing fine. My community is hungry, sick, lacks access to education, faces striking illiteracy, are not only not defended by but are actively attacked by local police and security forces.
> What exactly do you expect the rest of us to do with our time and how will it be anything other than bullshit?
Well there's a national childcare crisis going on where childcare costs more than a mortgage. There's also an education crisis going on where education costs more than people make in 10 years. There's a housing crisis going on where people can't into homes and are becoming forever renters. There's a healthcare crisis going on where people cannot actually afford to go to the doctor or have to ration their medications to get the care they need -- even with insurance. So my proposal would be to take people a way from doing bullshit jobs and get them into those professions to help out with those various crises.
There are so many problems in the world, you really can't think of anything that would be helped by someone well educated and motivated to work on any of those problems?
People going hungry, unhoused, traumatized, the Earth's warming, there's cancer. Getting funding for those things is also hard, but that's also a job!
Despite you being an individual, you reflect an aberration of sentiment here that makes no sense
For example, the larger economy hasn't failed, another view is that this is price discovery of a mispriced agent in the market. A wage worker whose actual productivity isn't valued accurately, and a market based solution has been developed that allows for closer accuracy. More profits to the insider and the copy trader, their available capital and liquidity is derived from their utility to the employment sector and their potential profits with that capital and liquidity is derived from the event's actual utility to the market.
Additionally, the productivity of all agents isn't known, you don't know what they were doing with their time before and it likely was suboptimal already - as in doomscrolling on social media or vegetating on the couch.
Finally, you have no way of quantifying if those lazy things were suboptimal uses of time, or if a completely active other activity was suboptimal or optimal, as this goes into relative utility and schools of ethics.
It's only a matter of time until Social Security starts to fail, right after we've paid all the boomers their full benefits (and just in time for me to be eligible), and then they'll have to implement "austerity measures." After that, groceries, gas, housing, health "care," and higher education will have fully broken the middle class (it's already broken me, and I have a good job and a paid-off house), and the economy (sans imaginary AI investment bullshit) will be exposed as failing. AI (such as it is) will hammer entry level jobs, and tax revenues will be impacted by this. At the same time, we're going to have to start some sort of menial UBI, but with what money, I have no idea. Service on the national debt just surpassed military spending last year. When the shit hits the fan in another 10 years, the country will have to either go to war to reset the accounting ledgers, or actually put themselves on a budget. Which do you think will happen?
Given the numbers and rates we can see at present, all economic activity right now is a process of moving deck chairs on the Titanic. Sure, it hasn't failed, but it is an absolute certainly that it WILL. It's just a question of WHEN, and it's relatively soon. We have no adults in Washington. It's clear they're ALL just trying "get theirs" before it all comes crashing down.
And you wrote this all as a reaction to people trading on prediction markets? Markets that show velocity of transactions in a new, novel and growing way, which is the goal of our economies - to discourage hoarding in favor of transactions
Being a permabear doomer has nothing to do with the existence of prediction markets and other people’s participation in them
It can’t really fail all at once unless the US government dissolves. And people have been losing money on that bet for 250 years.
Luckily, if someone thinks the USG will actually fail, it’s really easy to trade on that possibility.
If paying for basic living expenses and higher education for your kids has "broken you", then you either didn't have the good job you thought you did or you aren't making very sound financial decisions (or both). Given that you own a paid off house, I suspect the actual issue is a complete lack of perspective on your part as to how well you have it.
In short, the economy is not failing, you're just a doomer.