Why?
That's why.
That's why.
The true "pointless jobs" are the thought leaders who try to warp political and economic philosophy to their own solipsistic psychological needs by pandering to the baser wants and desires of their audience. Most else is a circumstance of market inefficiencies or people not actually being worth the salary they used to be paid.
[0] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#chart03
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ilc/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm#table01
Feel free to provide a better measurement if you have one.
We'd like at least for 'real value' or 'productivity' as intuitively understood to contribute to GDP. That is, from an increase in value one may infer an increase in GDP (usually). I can accept that. I take issue with an inference in the other direction. If I knew how much 'real value' contributed to GDP and how much was in excess of that contribution, I would be an incredibly accomplished economist.
It's like in this story of soldiers who dig up latrines one day, and fill them up on another day. Yes, a lot of people were busy, but in the end, nothing useful got done and lots of man-hours were wasted.
I won't go as far as to claim that Economy is a pseudo science, but like many other disciplines it uses words that are already in use by the general population and redefines them to mean technical concepts. The end result is that economist can make statements that are technically true but that end up conveying a completely different message when listened by a lay person.
In this case, when an economist talks about "productivity", it has a very specific concept in mind. One that has more to do with ROI than with the manufacturing of any thing of value at all. Of course, both concepts are not completely detached from each other (it would be useless to grab a concept to mean something random instead), but they are not 100% aligned either, and this results in misunderstanding, if not actual misleading. By example, when some troubled company talks about "increasing employee productivity", naive employees expect some sort of training program to help them be more effective at their jobs. What they get is a pink slip instead; if productivity is ROI, you can lay off half of your people and use the company's momentum to keep turning 80% of the income, so on paper it will look like you are having better ROI (even if the cuts get too deep and are damaging the long term viability of the business).
HDI
A typical example would be political campaigns and/or advertising in highly competitive sectors - all work done there serves only to cancel out the work done by other people, thus creating a negative feedback loop that can consume infinite amount of resources for little marginal gain. Think about how much time, paper, paint and fuel is wasted printing leaflets and billboards and notice that if everyone collectively agreed not to do this, the results would be the same.
Touché. See, this is why we should all unit test with a fuzzer...
I suppose I would need to amend it to zero-or-less-value-add. This thought intertwines with the other line of discussion, in that these proposed "negative" items would likely be seen as GDP-positive. After all, someone needs to print all those pamphlets, and that's a value-add over paper and ink.
Interesting aside: São Paulo, Brasil has a ban on all outdoor advertising. Of course, that's only a limited subset of possible advertising, but it seems to have gone over well with the general populous.
Not to mention centralized efforts, such as QE, which are literally aimed at jobs creation, regardless of their value.
None of the three possibilities preclude the others, so there could be combinations. It could be all three.
-- Mark Anielski
Something to remember when you next start going on about "real value".
One example is efficiency. "Why," say the optimists, "would corporations continue to employ more people than they strictly need to?" Implicit in the question is a characterization of the corporation as a rational, singular entity.
And I say that 'optimists' ask this question because one of the large questions that some smart people ask is "where's the massive productivity increase that (one supposes) would accompany a surge in jobs-reducing automation?"
But if we just move down the chain a bit, and re-ask the question in terms of the actual top-down management of these companies, conclusions present themselves. And it's basically that hierarchical, traditional organizations may be bad at reaping these benefits, and they may need to be killed off/severely threatened by newcomers to change their ways.
There are a lot of unnecessary jobs hanging around, for totally rational reasons. Ask yourself:
"Why would any particular manager prefer to have more people working under him, rather than fewer?"
"Why would a Department Head with many direct reports not be eager to work with another Department head to closely co-operate in a way that reduces both headcount and duplication of management effort?"
"If a certain corporate fiefdom is becoming more efficient due to automation in certain areas of its operations, could there be any motivation for the manager of that fiefdom to expand other areas of his operations instead of passing on the full benefits of that efficiency in the form of a possibly-reduced budget?"
It should be clear to everyone that we are being limited by the structure of the organizations themselves. And we are seeing increasing activity in self-organized companies, cooperatives, etc, at the fringes (and also of extremely-integrated larger companies like Apple under Jobs, which is an old-model solution to the problem of the inefficiencies inherent in very hierarchical organizations).
The newer-model organizations may be better able to reap the benefits of automation.
TL;DR: humans used to be increasingly necessary as wet robots for manufacturing, and then largely moved up the food chain to bureaucracy when real robots made the wet ones inconvenient. Mostly-unnecessary jobs have more-or-less stuck around because of the limitations of organizations, not technology.
Doesn't make for an exciting and optimistic story, but it is what it is. Pure capitalism is just as impossible as pure socialism, due to the exact same moral hazards. Human beings tend to use power to leverage their advantages in any way imaginable, regardless of the prevailing laws and ideologies of the day.
The fed is pushing interest rates lower and lower to keep people employed - even if it is in purposeless, pointless jobs. When they stop though, we'll see how many of these jobs remain.
Zirp did the same thing in Japan, by the way. Japanese hate unemployment and with Zirp they were allowed to keep a lot of people employed that otherwise would be laid off in a normal functioning capitalist society.