“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program. Not an impossibly advanced one, mind you - it certainly would not have to be smarter than even the 50th percentile of programs out there today. If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This extends to all jobs, eventually. You are seeing it happen today, with farming. Tomorrow, we will see taxi and Lyft drivers replaced with self driving cars, and mail/package delivery given entirely to robots and drones.

The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing.

I don't appreciate the fact that you run so far away with this doomsday scenario of "no insurance means we all get sick and die". Try to focus on the discussion the article wants us to have, not on the side-scenario that you want to use to rationalize actuaries or other poorly optimized vocations.

Most jobs are somewhat bullshitty not because they solve no problem, but because they solve it in grossly contrived and ineffective way. That can be crushing, when you realize you're a cog in a Rube Goldberg contraption.

To take your example, private insurance against life-threatening events is very difficult to make effective through free markets: you need so many regulations to define what's cheating and prevent it (which criterions a company can discriminate against, preexisting conditions, transparency...) that you end up with a cost/effectiveness ratio even worse than that of mandatory, state operated systems from Europe.

There are also many jobs which are zero-sum games: if you do marketing or advertising on a non-elastic market, the job you do luring your competitors' customers is undone by the person doing the same job on your competitors' payrolls. It's, plain and simple, an arms race, and it's as wasteful as the USA/USSR one. Those jobs exist because markets aren't good enough at reaching multilateral disarmament agreements (except against customers' interests, as oligopolies).

More generally speaking, free markets are a stochastic optimization system that's (1) very slowly converging, which means an awful lot of resources are spent slowly crawling towards an optimum (2) pretty bad at escaping local optima and (3) navigating a space full of negative singularities (monopolies). We're stuck with a lot of bullshit jobs because they're doing OK at micro-optimization, but they're often quite bad at macro-optimization.

I think motor insurance would be a more difficult one to do away with - the question being if people didn't have to pay for any accidents they caused (via insurance premiums), would risk-taking increase to the point where the cost to the state became untenable? Then again if we lived in a futuristic society looked after by self-maintaining solar-powered robots then any service would essentially be free so maybe it wouldn't matter.

There are still plenty of jobs which are bullshit though. For example my girlfriend is an auditor. Most of her job would disappear if the infrastructure existed to have her clients financial records completely digitised. A program could then analyse the data (which is mostly done at the moment with a bunch of spreadsheets right now) and with higher audit coverage (they can only check/test a fraction of records and transactions). Her workload could go from 5-6 days a week to 2.

In the investment world there are a lot that come to mind.

A large number of financial advisors' entire job is just sales: they get clients funneled to companies that do the stock picking. They know these companies will not beat the indexes but it's safe, accepted, absolves them somewhat of responsibility when things go south, and these companies give them all the talking points they need to deal with clients efficiently so they can collect more.

Those companies see their job as not being out of line with the stock market indexes. They have to be a little different to justify their existence but not different enough to risk being way short of the benchmark. It is impossible for them to beat the market with their levels of risk aversion + fees, and there is no real incentive to do so. Within these companies, a large majority of the effort therefore goes to marketing to financial advisors trying to get their clients' money.

That's putting aside the question of whether there is any societal value if these RIA's were even trying and succeeding at getting more returns for their clients.

Some countries have figured some of that out: Distribute the health and education risk between every citizen (it typically achieves a 50% discount vs. privatly insured countries)[0]

[0] http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/...

Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these?

* Private equity CEOs

* Lobbyists

* PR researchers

* Telemarketers

* Bailiffs

Tell us how the world would be worse off without them.

You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.

In terms of personal insurance, a world with less insurance looks like a place where people don't suffer just for the small risk of such a loss.

Catastrophic events such as fire and health could be dealt with more sympathetically by society rather than being handled by a profit-making industry that only really wants to help people who are rich enough.

I think that is the bigger picture that he is getting at. In an "ideal society" these jobs wouldn't need to exist.

It's about people who think THEIR OWN jobs are unnecessary. The author seems to spend half his time repeating this on comments sections, even when the very titles make it clear. Because people give the least charitable (and incorrect) interpretations.

It could be that if everyone only invested passively, then there would be untapped alpha in the market which would lead to greater profits to the active asset management industry. This in turn would lead to more active management firms leading to an equilibrium where alpha is nullified.

Not an expert on economics. Just saying this form of bullshit may be vital to the system.

I wouldn't quite use the word mandated. But at least in the case where I am currently, South Africa, all sorts of financial instruments such as the ones you mention, are heavily "pushed" by government via various means. I.e. tax-exemption benefits, incentivizing insurance/financial brokers into pushing by making it a regulated license industry (protected status), and plain out funding the industry by using it to give government employees plushy "retirement packages" in the form of these instruments.

It's such a sad state of affairs (at least in this small subset of discussion). I've actually been wondering about it quite a lot recently. While I watch perfectly smart, educated individuals being effectively "tricked" into putting huge amounts of their monthly earnings to save up for "retirement" because it's "tax-exempt". Ironically, all those savings get taxed as "income" anyways when they withdraw from it in retirement. Wait, it's not funny.

Meanwhile, whilst they are busy being coaxed into this scheme due to "tax exemption" benefits, they're paying mounds of interest on car and home loans that they could pay off ridiculously sooner. Those loans that are constantly funding financial institutions? You could argue that it's another way in which the government is "funneling" capital into it.

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I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate".

I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like.

(Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)

We might do amazing things. Then again, we might have a world where nobody scrubs toilets and lots of people make lousy paintings.

"What do I want to make/do?" and "what produces value for others?" are not always in sync. Having to sell your labor means there must be at least some link between supply and demand.

So unless we have strict blocks on pricing things, UBI seems nonsensical.

I've worked in a public sector department that was run like a business. It was a contact centre that provided information and assistance with various government functions, but to do so it, it competed with private sector providers at open tender for the business of those various government departments.

Of course, it had a massive price advantage, as it was a) small and focused and b) not required to turn a profit.

That aside, it was run like a business, because if any customers were significantly displeased, the clients could easily move to another provider. So the focus on quality was high.

It ultimately provided a quality service to users, cheaply. But, and this was the important takeaway for me, the person running it burned all of his political capital protecting this highly performant section of a ministry from interference from other mandarins within the ministry.

He was a good man, and he expended his career protecting efficiency in the midst of public sector "meh".

Anyway, my long winded point is that public sector isn't inherently inefficient, and private sector isn't inherently efficient. Any sufficiently large organisation sprouts a self-sustaining bureaucracy. Public or private. In my mind, it's merely correlation that public sector organisations are typically inefficient. The causation is organisational complexity (that is, a large strata of middle managers)

Thus perfectly illustrating the concept of privilege.

Since employment is the key growth factor/number that is regarded (you need money to live), it is vitally important to make sure companies will hire as many people as possible, thus giving benefits going into that direction.

So even if you sit on your butt browsing HN, imgur, what not all day long (which many do), you'll get paid at the end of the month, and that's "all that matters".

Seems to be rather inefficient use of time, use of life.

You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout.

Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment benefits.

I think there is room for improvement within this economic system.