> Cut the people with the vision and strategy of the company,

The vision and strategy that lead directly to layoffs? Seems like a reasonable thing to me.

Imagine you run a start-up. You need to expand rapidly and hire all sorts of salespeople. In 10 years you have cornered the market so well that there is no (good) alternative product and growth in the market de facto goes to you. You are the default option.

Do you keep the salespeople that you hired, or do you cut management for getting in the situation that salespeople weren't creating any value?

It's funny how you assume there'a choice. Unemployment in Europe as a whole (including Eastern Europe) is ~20%. Depends on what/when exactly of course but it is. Government (non-productive by definition, by which I mean they don't add value, not that they're not useful) is easily half of the remainder. So Europe has 40% value-adding employees among the working age population, which is about half the total population, or 20%.

In America it's actually better, close to 30%. Everywhere else it's much worse. In the Middle East, Africa, most of Asia it's at most 10%, and usually less than half that.

That means that you could, not in 50 years when the robots have taken over, TODAY, kill 85% of the population and the net effect on the world would be ... nothing. GDP wouldn't drop by so much as a dollar. Today, 85% of all humans alive are useless for the economy (some are school children and will become useful, but you could assume that to be ~10% and you wouldn't be far off the mark).

So for doing everything we do today, and for guaranteeing the future, we need around 25% of the human race. Everyone else is economically useless.

Note that this figure has been dropping for 40%, and has been for essentially all of history, with only short blips where more of the human race is actually useful (like the 30 or so post-WWII years). Even 15% economically useful population, historically speaking, is actually high, not low. What I mean to say is that the neutral expectation should be that that number is going to drop, not rise.

So: no, a company should not ever be able to restructure. Every month, every day, every second we can keep that number up by even a small amount gives use one more month, one more day, one more second of the society we currently have, where people are actually somewhat useful. The alternative, if you think it through, I'm sure you'll see, is war.

Or to put it another way: we need these people to have a job much more than we need a few extra dollars of GDP.

> Unemployment in Europe as a whole (including Eastern Europe) is ~20%.

According to [1] unemployment in the EU-28 is actually 6.7% as of November 2018. Of course, there are some European countries that are not in the EU, but I doubt that including them will cause the figure to rise to 20%.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

> So for doing everything we do today, and for guaranteeing the future, we need around 25% of the human race. Everyone else is economically useless.

No, that does not follow. For example, a stay-at-home spouse who takes care of the kids may be "economically useless" in a very shallow sense (i.e. they do not appear in GDP figures), but that does not make them useless.

In Norway, staying at home with kids and managing the house is counted as work and you get "pension points" for it just like a regular job.

But they do not appear in the GDP figures of course.

I think you are overestimating a bit: killing the government employees would reduce GDP. The government may not directly produce GDP, but it is essential for providing the conditions for business. Simply cutting away the peaceful enforcement of contracts and peaceful settlement of disputes privided by the government (two major purposes of the courts and police) would have immediate negative consequences. Within a few years you would also feel the consequences of nobody planning, building and maintaining infrastructure, or collecting the taxes to do so.

Even assuming your argument is correct and the world floats on with between 90-70% ‘dead weight’ as you seem to put it, GDP would fall significantly because you have significantly less consumers spending. Not to mention that society would pretty much grind to a halt because all the people doing intangible work that isn’t counted in GDP, like having and looking after children and replenishing our human capital.

We live in an imperfect world, and not everything has a utility function that is measured by headline figures

Yeah I think you're forgetting that consumers are a very important part of functioning local, national and global economies. If the only businessman in a farming town runs a grocery store selling the potatoes from one farmer and you killed everyone else off besides that farmer and store owner, that town's GDP will drop to 0 within their lifespan. This can basically be extrapolated to the global level?

Also why should we artificially extend forcing most humans into agency-less drudgery for 60% of their sentient healthy waking hours? I think the sooner we embrace having 15% of the population producing the net economic output and providing the rest of the society with what they need, the faster we can figure out a significantly better and fulfilling society for everyone.

If human life is only valued by economic output, we've failed as a species.

Not a Thanos fan?