We need about 1% of people to grow the food and perhaps 9% of the people to make stuff we need.

The other 90% then have to convince the 10% that do the actual work that they are worth the time to produce a surplus for. IP barriers are one way of doing that. Even farmers like pop songs.

Close. About 1.4% for farming and under 13% for all other tangible goods.[1]

Take a close look at that table. It's really important. Growth areas: Health care and social assistance, educational services, leisure and hospitality, and construction.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...

Bear in mind that the United States manufactures a fraction of the manufactured goods it consumes.

"During 2016, the U.S. exported $1,051 billion in manufactured goods and imported $1,920 billion, a manufacturing goods deficit of $868 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...

That 90% does not live on IP, they live by offering medical care, police service, education, roads, reservoirs and aqueducts. By transporting those farm goods, inventing new tractors and efficiently managing all these things.

And while pop songs artists may deserve compensation, society does not crucially depend on someone collecting royalties for generations after the guy's death.

On the farmer analogy (and inspired by the recent .org tld acquisition), if one really wanted to extract rents, simply acquire the land they work on and set them all to sharecropping.

That assumes the amount each individual person "works" remains the same. Why not full-time employment at 15 hours a week, with 30% of people making stuff we need?

Most of our efficiency gains are presently being funneled into a glut of overproduction of nonsensical "goods" (eg overfinancialization and overadministration) rather than direct quality of life improvements of everyone being able to work less.

That assumes fungibility and substitution. The reason we have 1% of people making the food is because that is the specialisation we can't eliminate by mechanisation and automated processes.

The "Spreading the unemployment" argument is a bit like saying we don't need all those violin players in the orchestra, just ship a few unemployed people in and give those violin players Thursday and Friday off.

Sure, abstractly. But to continue the analogy - there is presently a glut of violin players and other musicians, and everyone currently making up the orchestras have no time to do anything else.

And yeah, the "best" orchestra is going to face an insatiable demand for their specific time, and likely enjoys performing as much as humanly possible. But these conditions are exceptional, rather than the situation faced by basically everybody else.

Why not 4% with robots handling the rest?

I was saying what the numbers would change to at the same level of technological progression, but with policy changing to make the work more evenly distributed.

Obviously the long-term goal is ever-more automation. But current economic policy is based around creating full full-time employment, which is fundamentally at-odds with ever-less needing to be done due to automation. Hence the proliferation of anti-productive "bullshit jobs" where people ultimately aren't ultimately helping to produce anything (eg the entire medical billing system), but still need to cling on and go through the motions so they can eat.