> Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty..

An interesting aspect is that those jobs are low technical skill, but can require good to very good social skills to be done well.

Without joking, greeting an elderly entering a bank and guiding them to the section they needs to go, explain briefly what they need to do, is can be non trivial.

That’s not what people mean when referring to low skill jobs.

What you’re saying would be similar to saying a warehouse worker might be low in technical skill but high in strength skill, which just misses the point that people refer to low skill jobs as jobs that require little education or specialization.

I am not sure everyone shares that definition. Would sales or manager be a low skill job for instance ? For a number of these positions you need little to no specific education or specialisation.

In some ways the very low social skilled worker is better at the job than the person with higher technical skills. I know some people with Downs Syndrome, their employers hire them for greeter type tasks because they obviously unsuited for anything: it makes thing move fast when the public realizes they won't get anything out of the greeter so they have to read the signs to figure out what they should know. The public likes to know that otherwise "useless" people have a productive job and so public opinion of them goes up. The greeter like the feeling of doing something useful, plus the money in their pocket. Everybody is better for this. Of course someone has available to handle trouble makers.

These "low skill" customer-facing jobs are also considered important and held in quite high regard in Japan, something we seem to have forgotten in the west.

The United States, is, in a sense, a communist country, given that most people own a good portion of major companies. However, like every other communist society literally ever, your diminutive share of ownership means little and there's still one guy in charge, except our guys differ by industry and vertical.

>most people own a good portion of major companies.

Are you revering to the stock market? I don‘t believe this is true. Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies. Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.

> Are you revering to the stock market?

What else would I be referring to?

> Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies

Most people invest in mutual funds, which do own a significant portion of the largest corporations. This is fine; most communist systems in practice allow for private ownership of smaller businesses.

> Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.

This is true, but communism refers to the communal ownership of the means of production. In practice, communist societies typically end up with some small group of people having an outsized influence on the means of production. Although nominally, they own an equal share of them, this is in name only. By all metrics of control, they own a larger share. My guess is that the US (and free market systems in general with widespread ownership) is probably more egalitarian in that regard.